I Ain't One To Gossip But ...

Yes, I absolutely adore all things LuPone, from the voice to the face to the talent to the mouth that  just loves telling people off with F-bombs.

Patti LuPone once famously went on a tear about performing in a show and having an audience member haul out her phone for a text or Tweet or some nonsense. LuPone stopped the show cold and berated the woman for her rudeness; then, for good measure, Patti had her tossed from the theatre. Do not fuck with LuPone. And now someone else has.

Back story: Patti LuPone played Joanne in a West End revival of Company in 2018 and won an Olivier Award for it. When that revival moved to Broadway in 2020, Patti went with it, but after just a handful of performances, COVID-19 hit and Broadway was closed for nearly a year. The show re-opened when Broadway came back late last year, but last February Patti came down with COVID and had to bow out of a few shows, only to return to this nonsense.

Patti LuPone is not getting COVID again, no matter what, and so one night during a post-show Q&A with the cast of Company, LuPone noticed an indiscretion so vile, so contemptable, so below the character of a real theatergoer that she went off.

The rule of post-COVID theaters is fairly simple: audience members must cover their noses and mouths at all times except when they’re eating or drinking in designated areas. And yet someone dared to drop mask and show nose and La LuPone was not having it:

LuPone: Put your mask over your nose. That is why you’re in the theater. That is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, GET THE FUCK OUT! Who do you think you are if you do not respect the people that are sitting around you!

Asshatted Theatergoer: We pay your salary!

LuPone: You pay my salary? Bullshit. [Producer] Chris Harper pays my salary. Just put your mask over your nose.

And, as Patti does when Patti goes off, the offending maskless trolls were herded from the theater, and hopefully banned from live performances for the rest of their lives.

Here’s to the divas who rant!

SIDENOTE: In 1993 Andrew Llyod Weber hired Patti LuPone to play Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. when it opened in London, with the caveat that Patti take the role to Broadway. Well, ALW decided he wanted Glenn Close to be his Broadway Norma, and unceremoniously kicked Patti to the curb. Patti sued for breach of contract and was awarded well over a million dollars which she used to build a pool at her Connecticut farm that she called the Andrew Lloyd Weber Pool.

Goddess, I adore her.

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Frank Langella is on the Whine Tour after being fired from the Netflix series Fall of the House of Usher after being accused by one of his co-stars of touching her inappropriately during a love scene, telling off-color jokes, calling women ‘baby’ and ‘honey,’ and touching without permission.

But Langella :::foot stomp head snap:::: says he is a victim of “the increasing madness that currently pervades our industry” because Frank thinks it’s still the 1960s and racist jokes and pawing women and acting like a pig are still okay. Unlike Bill Murray, who, after getting fired from a different film for similar offenses, realized “the world is different than it was when I was a little kid” and learned a lesson, the only lesson Langella learned was, well, nothing:

“I have been canceled. Just like that.

In the increasing madness that currently pervades our industry, I could not have imagined that the words ‘collateral damage’ would fall upon my shoulders. They have brought with them a weight I had not expected to bear in the closing decades of my career. And along with it has come an unanticipated sense of grave danger.

On April 14 of this year, I was fired by Netflix for what they determined to be unacceptable behavior on set. My first instinct was to blame. To lash out and seek vengeance. I interviewed crisis managers, tough connected lawyers, the professionally sympathetic at $800 per hour. Free advice was proffered as well:

‘Don’t play the victim.’

‘Don’t sue. They’ll dig into your past.’

‘Sign the NDA, take the money and run.’

‘Do the talk shows, show contrition, feign humility. Say you’ve learned a lot.’

Apologize. Apologize. Apologize.”

And yet he chooses to play the victim, declaring that Netflix has robbed him of the opportunity to play the one last great role of his career, that of Roderick Usher. And he digs in his heels and says he was being 100% professional and correct, and that his female co-star and the intimacy coordinator they’d worked with were being “absurd” about him running his hands up the actress’s leg after the director called “Cut!”

Cut it, Frank. Stop talking or all you’ll be remembered for is a handsy old man.

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Kim Kardastrophe’s determination to wear a dead woman’s clothes, which don’t even fit is never-ending; because after ALLEGEDLY losing 16 pounds in a matter of days to squeeze her ass in Marilyn Monroe’s gown for the Met Gala, Kimmy says she wore a second dress that she also borrowed from Ripley’s Believe it or Not Museum that night.

It must be a Dead Woman’s Clothes thing this year, after last year’s Hooded Head Nonsense and the Grandma’s Couch look from a few years back.

Oh, and it’s also a lie that she dropped some pounds to wear the gown because the dress didn’t cover her ass so Kim draped a fur over her butt to cover the gap … in fashion and taste and basic good sense, and her ass.

Now, I’m not saying Kimmy didn’t wear Marilyn’s dress, and I’m not saying she did, but I will say that the dress looked far better on Marilyn, and quite different on Kim, who says it was because she wore the straps differently.

Kimmy? You’ll never be a Marilyn Monroe Icon. She’s been gone sixty years and people still talk of her, write books of her, make films of her. When you’re gone six minutes the world will say, “Who?”

Marilyn's Dress   Kim's Krappy Knockoff   It Doesn't Fit

Well, it looks like Fred Savage is Frank Langella 2.0.

The former Wonder Years star, and current director and executive producer of the Wonder Years reboot, has been canned from a project for ALLEGEDLY ass-holiness and “inappropriate behavior.”

Fred starred as Kevin Arnold in the original Wonder Years which ran from 1988 to 1993 and came in as producer for the 2021 reboot that focused on a Black middle-class family in the 1960s, and now all of his wonder years are over because Disney has cut ties with Savage following multiple complaints of misconduct:

“Recently, we were made aware of allegations of inappropriate conduct by Fred Savage, and as is policy, an investigation was launched. Upon its completion, the decision was made to terminate his employment as an executive producer and director of The Wonder Years.”

Details about the nature of the allegations are unclear, but it seems as if Savage hasn’t really changed because back in 2018 Savage’s Wonder Years TV mom Alley Mills revealed that the original show ended because Savage and Jason Hervey, the actor that played Kevin’s older brother, were slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit.

And then Savage ALLEGEDLY brought his “inappropriate” behavior to the set of The Grinder, starring Rob Lowe, the guy who slept with a 16-year-old in the 80s, and Savage was accused of physically and verbally abusing a crew member on that show. He denied the allegations and settled the associated lawsuit out of court but, you know, once, twice, three strikes and you’re kind of an asshole, Fred.

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Remember way back in 2019 when Jennifer Lopez was in the movie Hustlers where she played JLo as a stripper? If you don’t. stay tuned for the JLo documentary Halftime which tells the tale of her halftime performance with Shakira from conception through performance, but also details the subsequent Oscar snub for Hustlers that sent her into a tailspin; picture it, an image of JLo crying in bed as she remembers that horrific snub, and her own voice-over saying:

“It was hard. I just had a very low self-esteem. I had to really figure out who I was and believe in that, and not believe in anything else.”

Seriously, Jennifer Lopez thought she should have been nominated for an Oscar and filmed herself crying about it?

Maybe she’s going for an Emmy for her performance of a woman who didn’t get an Academy Award nod.

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