Mama Kathy or Mama Rose?

Kathy Halenda is, according to her own cast bio, “a buxom, brassy broad.”

Which is, of course, a key qualification for playing Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” which arrives at the INB Performing Arts Center on Thursday in a national touring production.

“I’m proud to be a broad,” laughs Halenda. “A broad is a tough, inappropriate chick with a lot of opinions and a heart of gold.”

Halenda has plenty of other qualifications. She’s a veteran of 14 national tours, including “Oliver!” and “42nd Street,” both of which played Spokane in the 1990s. She stole the show both times.

So she should be up to the challenge of playing Mama Rose, the mother of all stage mothers. The brassiest broads in American theater history have tackled this role, including Ethel Merman, Rosalind Russell, Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Linda Lavin, Bette Midler and Bernadette Peters.

“It’s the quintessential role for any actress to play,” said Halenda, by phone from a tour stop in Colorado Springs. “It’s also the most difficult – Evita and Mama Rose, those are the two toughest.”

Why such a challenge? For one thing, Mama Rose sings eight of the 16 songs in the show. Usually, even a show’s lead actor doesn’t have to handle more than three or four songs.

“And Mama Rose not only sings a lot, but she yells,” said Halenda.

It’s tough on the vocal cords and requires a lot of physical stamina. Halenda said she can’t exactly go out after the show and party on this tour.

“I’m living like a nun,” she said.

At least the kind of nun who travels the country on a bus.

This Phoenix Entertainment tour is about halfway through a 200-show schedule. It travels with a cast of 25, including six children, a six-piece orchestra and a small army of crew members.

It’s a non-Equity (nonunion) tour, based in part on the 2003 Broadway revival starring Peters.

This Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical has never truly been out of the public eye since the day it debuted on Broadway in 1959 with Ethel Merman.

“I’m not sure whether ‘Gypsy’ is new fashioned or old fashioned …,” wrote critic Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune. “The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s the best damn musical I’ve seen in years.”

It ran for two years and has been revived three times on Broadway, with Lansbury, Daly and Peters. A fourth Broadway revival, starring Patti LuPone, opens in March.

And it has played countless times in regional theaters, community theaters, schools and national tours.

Why does it remain so popular?

” ‘Gypsy’ is one of those rare shows where the script is really as important as the music,” said Halenda.

The story is based loosely on the life of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It includes many lighthearted musical-comedy moments – it is set, after all, in the world of vaudeville and burlesque.

“Kids and strippers – what more do you want?” said Halenda, with a laugh.

Yet it also functions as a powerful and emotional look at an overprotective mother and a family struggling to get by in difficult circumstances. There’s plenty of collateral psychological damage.

New York Times theater critic Frank Rich called it “Broadway’s own brassy, unlikely answer to ‘King Lear.’ ” He said it was his favorite musical of all time.

“It speaks to you one way when you are a child, and then chases after you to say something else when you’re grown up,” wrote Rich in 1989.

Halenda said it’s the kind of show that can make any woman feel better about herself; at least she’s “not that dysfunctional.”

Yet she has set herself the challenge of portraying Mama Rose as a deeply sympathetic figure.

“She loved her children undeniably and she was a survivor,” said Halenda. “She was very courageous, very strong – and definitely dysfunctional.”