I adore Patti LuPone. She’s talented, brassy, ballsy, bold and has exactly zero fucks left to give. Even when it comes to old feuds like her decades long-running tiff with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
La LuPone, as I call her, is returning to Broadway this spring with the revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company and so she’s doing some press; and whenever Patti does press her tiff with ALW comes up. Now, Patti dished ALW in her 2011 memoir Patti LuPone: A Memoir and last year he countered with memories of her in his own book Unmasked: A Memoir, in which he dragged La LuPone for her diction. As you know, and if you don’t WTF is wrong with you, La LuPone was the original Evita and ALW still had a few notes for her about her performance.
Here’s how Patti found that out in a recent interview:
Did you read Andrew Lloyd Webber’s memoir?
No. Am I in it?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, dear.
The interviewer tells her that Andy “rehashed the expected stuff” like their falling out when ALW fired her from the Broadway production of Sunset Boulevard and replaced her with Glenn Close, and the interviewer says Andy “made a point of criticizing” La LuPone’s diction. Now, Patti wasn’t surprised by that, and even acknowledged it saying:
“You don’t know, when you’re in the moment, that you’re not enunciating.”
She added that John Houseman used to call her “flannel mouth” back in the day. So, she was fine with the diction comments until she realized he was talking about her performance in Evita:
“How could he talk about “Evita”? The whole thing is sung. He’s a jerk. He’s a sad sack. He is the definition of sad sack. I never wanted to do “Evita,” because it was the most bizarre music I’d ever heard. You’re raised on Rodgers and Hammerstein, Meredith Willson, Lerner and Loewe, and then you hear that? I heard the “Evita” concept album, and I went, ‘Ow, my ear.’”
But then she added:
“I thought ‘Evita’ was the best thing he and Tim Rice did. But the rest of it is schmaltz.”
That’s why I love La LuPone, a compliment and a dig going hand-in-hand.
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