Patti LuPone on musicals, going viral and living with Aubrey Plaza
One of Broadway’s greatest ever stars is coming to Australia. The theatre doyenne, and roommate of Parks and Recreation’s cult star, tells Review why the great southern land is her second home.
Patti LuPone can’t stop crying. The triple Tony Award winner has devoured juicy roles on and off Broadway for five decades, but her latest tour, arriving in Australia later this month, is decidedly personal.
“It’s an emotional journey for me,” LuPone says of the show, A Life in Notes. “I’m on beta-blockers because I just keep crying because I’m recalling my life and looking back, it’s like: ‘Wow. What is that about?’”
It is a bright afternoon in New York when I speak with LuPone from her apartment, via Zoom. The tabloids there are fascinated with LuPone’s current living situation – when Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza landed her first off-Broadway role last year, LuPone invited her to be her flatmate. During our interview, Plaza flits in and out, having recently arrived home from the Cannes Film Festival. LuPone delights at playing cheerleader, and gushes over what Plaza is wearing – “She looks fabulous!”
When LuPone started building A Life in Notes, some songs reached out from the past, demanding to be included. Lilac Wine is a case in point.
“It was written in 1949 … I don’t want to give the story away, but I heard it when I was 19,” she says. “I heard Nina Simone sing Lilac Wine and it was at that time in my life growing up and alone in Manhattan. I’ve never forgotten it, never forgotten her interpretation of it, and I can still see the event, the place when I first heard that song.”
Another crucial timestamp is provided by the title song from Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.
“We all have songs that remind us where we were when we first heard it. And besides the songs that are personal touchstones, there are songs that reflect a decade. When I was on stage doing Anything Goes, we were in the AIDS epidemic. And New York was a chaotic mess.”
A Life in Notes includes a handful of LuPone’s ride-or-die musical numbers, but otherwise tracks a very different path to her previous show to tour here, Don’t Monkey with Broadway. Collaborating with director Scott Wittman and musical director Joseph Thalken, LuPone has assembled a setlist that will surprise many of her fans. There are nods to The Beatles, Burt Bacharach, and Bob Dylan. Songs made famous by Rosemary Clooney, Peggy Lee, and Cyndi Lauper also feature. Unexpected instrumental excerpts serve as bridges between songs, and the deeply personal stories they reflect.
LuPone grew up in Long Island bopping along to a transistor radio in the early years of rock ’n’ roll. She nominates Janis Joplin and Stevie Nicks as her definitive rock voices – “You’re never going to hear those voices on Broadway”. Linda Ronstadt is another singer LuPone deeply admires.
While a much younger version of herself tried to sing rock ’n’ roll and “ended up sounding like Ethel Merman”, an older and wiser LuPone is content to do things her way.
“I’m not imitating anybody. I’m just singing the way I would sing it at my age now.”
LuPone religiously avoids social media these days, but during the Covid-19 pandemic she experienced a viral moment of her own, thanks to an unexpected cameo courtesy of a pinball machine. LuPone was streaming live, singing a cappella from her Connecticut basement for a theatre fundraiser hosted by Rosie O’Donnell.
“Somebody, those internet sleuths, saw the pinball machine behind me. That’s how that happened. They saw the pinball machine and they said, ‘We want to see what her basement looks like’.”
LuPone obliged, and in the early weeks of the pandemic recorded a series of zany clips rushing around her basement showing off treasures and knick-knacks acquired over the years: a vintage jukebox; awards stashed in a locker; costumes kept from memorable roles. The pinball machine was a recurring guest star.
“I became more famous on Zoom than I’ve ever been in my career,” she quips.
During lockdown LuPone kept in touch with the world on Twitter (now known as X). Among other things, we learned that she enjoyed listening to Taylor Swift’s Folklore album on repeat while savouring a road trip around Maine with her son. Following the sale of the social media platform to Elon Musk in late 2022, she signed off in typical LuPone fashion.
“Dolls, I’m reactivating my MySpace and getting off this electric dumpster fire.”
The American media love LuPone because she’s not afraid to say what’s on her mind. Like the caustic character Joanne she played in the recent Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company – a role which earned her third Tony – LuPone has zingers to burn.
LuPone has offered withering one-liners when asked her opinion of fellow celebrities including Madonna and Kim Kardashian. TV host Andy Cohen has created a segment, Does Patti Give a Damn?, where she gives quickfire responses to happenings in pop culture. (For the record, LuPone does care about the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster lawsuits, but isn’t interested in Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s Netflix series).
When this writer last interviewed LuPone, ahead of her 2018 tour, she shared her affection for Australia, and a desire to visit the Kimberley region. Will she be able to tick that item off the bucket list this time?
A brutal schedule, thanks to a new starring role on Broadway, put paid to that.
“I don’t know why I haven’t been able to get over to the west coast of Australia. It’s probably the only place I haven’t seen. I’ve done Tasmania to Lizard Island on the east coast. I’ve done Townsville. I flew from Townsville to Alice and drove from Alice to Darwin with stops in Daly River, Mataranka, Katherine, Ross River, Ayers Rock.”
Reminiscing about that road trip takes the performer back to a simpler time, when she starred in the Australian production of Evita in 1981, and undertook a travel itinerary that was “two inches thick” with detours and survival notes.
“I’ve been to Greece, I’ve been to Italy, I’ve been to places of antiquity, but I’ve never sensed antiquity the way I did (in the) outback. I thought, ‘OK. I kind of get how old Earth is’.”
Those madcap lockdown videos in LuPone’s basement were a fun distraction, but they masked a fear held by many in the business – that the work may never return.
Since theatres reopened, LuPone has made up for lost time, and has barely taken a break.
Following her Australian concert dates, she will return home and head back to the rehearsal room. LuPone is set to star in a new play, The Roommate, opposite her old friend Mia Farrow. (The pair were introduced to each other by Sondheim in the early 2000s. They live in the same part of Connecticut, and their children attended school together). The play also reunites LuPone with director Jack O’Brien, who she first worked with in the 70s, after graduating from Juilliard.
Shortly after The Roommate opens at the Booth Theatre in September, LuPone will feature in the Marvel spin-off series Agatha All Along on Disney+.
“I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of this coven. It’s an extraordinary group of actors,” she says.
LuPone will appear as Lilia Calderu, a 450-year-old Sicilian witch, skilled in the art of divination.
“I think I am a witch to start off with,” LuPone says matter-of-factly. “I have precognizance and I have ancestral women on my shoulders. And what is a witch really? The witch is just dealing organically.”
In Agatha All Along she performs alongside Plaza, Kathryn Hahn, and Joe Locke – the breakout star of the queer indie hit Heartstopper. Locke is another next generation performer whom LuPone has happily taken under her wing, and offered words of encouragement and advice.
For now, LuPone is focused on getting through A Life in Notes, one song and one memory at a time. The tears arrive in certain numbers, and audiences have embraced LuPone’s honesty, and reflected on their own experiences.
“If music is a powerful entity, if it’s something that we rely on and marks a moment, people are relating to it because they’re remembering their journey,” LuPone says.
“They’re remembering when they were seven or when they were 12. They’re remembering their first love. They’re remembering that broken heart. They’re remembering a moment in life when they lost somebody.”
Unlike LuPone’s earlier themed shows, A Life in Notes is driven and defined by the music itself.
“It’s something that we need as humans. It’s something we rely on, and we all have those moments in our lives where it saved us, it soothed us, it awakened something in us. That’s what this show is about.”
Patti LuPone will perform at the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, June 19; the City Recital Hall in Sydney, June 21-22; the Palais Theatre in Melbourne, June 24-25; and the QPAC Concert Hall, June 27.
