After Angela, any other Rose is secondhand A slew of new musicals is slated to hit London in the coming year, among them The Book of Mormon, and adaptations of the hit movies Bridget Jones, Bend It Like Beckham, Slumdog Millionaire and Finding Neverland. What excites me, however, is the rumour that Chichester Festival Theatre is planning to revive the Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents classic Gypsy, dating from 1959 and focused on the early life of the sophisticated stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. If the production transfers to London (in what is known in the business as a "Chich and in"), it will be the first West End outing for this punchy, witty, tuneful and richly human show since 1973, when Angela Lansbury played Gypsy's mother, Mama Rose. This time round, Imelda Staunton is said to be lined up for this belter of a role. Staunton is a marvel, but she has a hard act to follow: Lansbury's performance is one of the most electrifying and moving pieces of acting I have seen in half a century of theatre-going. One scene in particular is seared on my memory. Towards the end of the show, Rose's long-suffering and neglected boyfriend-cum-factotum announces that he is walking out on her. Suddenly the mask drops, as Rose - until then posturing as a sort of outsize parody of the nightmare stage mother - is stunned. "Don't go!" she implores him in panic. "Why not?" he retorts wearily. Because I need you! For what? For a thousand things! Even today, remembering the welter of desperate, confused emotion with which Lansbury imbued those starkly simple lines - in particular that word "thousand" - makes the hairs on my neck bristle. This was acting that transcends mimicry: a woman on the precipice of her life, ripping herself open to reveal the tormented soul within, as rawly tragic as Medea or Clytemnestra. Follow Telegraph Theatre on Twitter