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Patti Lupone Returns

Beloved Broadway start teams up with Mandy Patinkin at Shea's

Throughout her childhood, Patti LuPone and her family would travel from their home on Long Island to Western New York to visit relatives in the Jamestown-Dunkirk area. She will make a return visit to the region on May 2, when she appears with Mandy Patinkin at Shea’s Performing Arts Center for one performance only at 8pm.

Patti Lupone in Gypsy

An Evening with Patti LuPone and Many Patinkin has reunited the two stars on stage for the first time since their Tony Award winning performances in the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical Evita in 1979. LuPone played the title character; Patinkin played Che Guevara. The May 2 show will be the featured entertainment for the Shea’s Annual Gala.

Patti LuPone is a Broadway star of the first magnitude. In addition to Evita, she starred in hit revivals of Anything Goes, Sweeney Todd, and most recently as Rose in Gypsy, which won her a second Tony Award. She also has the distinction of creating the role of Fantine in the original London production of Les Misérables, a performance for which she was recognized with the first Olivier award ever won by an American actor. (She won a second Olivier for The Cradle Will Rock.) She was also the original Norma Desmond in the musical Sunset Boulevard in London. In the non-musical theater, she is closely associated with playwright David Mamet, for whom she has starred in several plays. She has numerous screen and recording credits.

LuPone is a popular solo performer who can fill a Broadway house or Carnegie Hall. But how did the LuPone-Patinkin reunion happen?

“A booker in Richardson, Texas put this together,” she recalls. And the clever fellow used some guile.

“He called up my agent and said, ‘I’ve got Mandy. How about Patti?’ Then he called Mandy’s agent and said, ‘I’ve got Patti. How about Mandy?’ And he put us together for the first time in 25 years!

“After that, Mandy said to me, ‘I don’t want to do ‘You sing a Song; I sing a song; we do a duet.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ He said, ‘Let’s me put a show together and I want to direct.’ So he and [pianist] Paul [Ford] assembled the material and that’s how it happened.”

Ann Reinking devised the show’s choreography.

Mandy Patinkin, of course, is no slouch either. In addition to the Tony he won for Evita, his work on stage includes roles in The Wild Party, Sunday in the Park with George, The Secret Garden, and The Knife. He won an Emmy Award for his work on Chicago Hope. His other screen credits include Criminal Minds, Yentl, Ragtime, Dick Tracy, Broken Glass, Life with Mikey and The Princess Bride. His most recent solo recording, Mandy Patinkin Sings Sondheim, is available on the Nonesuch label.

Patti Lupone's Unsolved Mystery

Patti LuPone traces her Western New York ancestry to Jamestown and Dunkirk, where her Italian-American family settled. While researching the family history, LuPone discovered an unsolved mystery. In the annals of family lore, there was a murder.

“Grandma Patti was accused of murdering Grandpa Patti,” reveals LuPone, speaking by telephone. “We were researching our family history, and found it in the Dunkirk paper! We also found out that my mother, and my grandmother, and my Uncle George, and ‘a Calabrese’ were taken into custody and were questioned. Uncle George and the Calabrese were held over night. Grandma and my mom were released.

“My mother never told me any of this. She never told me that my grandfather was murdered, and she certainly never told me that she was questioned in his murder.”

LuPone had heard a legend that her grandmother was involved in bootlegging and wonders if that figures into the story. Located on the shore of Lake Erie, Dunkirk certainly would have made a convenient location from which to run boats to and from Canada during the years of Prohibition.

“[Bootlegging] might have been Grandma’s profession—or maybe it was Grandpa’s,” speculates the beloved Broadway star. “Who knows? What was that murder about? If anybody out there is still alive and knows, please come forward and tell me. I’m dying to know!”

—anthony chase

A show with LuPone and Patinkin immediately captured interest across the country, and has now been booked in a number of cities. It promises to be fun, both for the chance to hear music associated with the stars and for the unlikely choices. Yes, Patti will sing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” but don’t expect an Evita duet.

“We could have done ‘Waltz for Che and Eva,’” notes LuPone, “but we’re not!”

Instead, the program is heavy with Richard Rodgers material with which neither star is closely associated, and with Stephen Sondheim material. Sondheim has been important to both careers.

“I didn’t make suggestions,” says LuPone. “I didn’t have to think about it. I trusted Mandy and Paul implicitly, because they have impeccable taste. As a result, I get to sing maybe the best love scene ever written for musical theater, ‘If I Loved You’ from Carousel. When I think of the confidence that Rodgers and Hammerstein had to have the characters sing that song twice! They didn’t think they needed another song. They were great actors, those composers! In those days! They created plot in their music.”

The show was first assembled six years ago (initially to open a performing arts center in Texas), and then toured around the country. It has now been booked in select cities again, culminating with a week at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles in June.

This incarnation is slightly different from the first outing, but LuPone indicates that the show is, at least for now, frozen.

“Mandy loves to alter it, and it is actually a lot of fun to keep it fresh, but at the moment I have an exorbitant amount of music to learn that is independent of this show. I’m working on [Kurt Weill’s] The Seven Deadly Sins for Cincinnati and Ravinia, and on a show for Las Vegas and Atlantic City. I said to Mandy, ‘Can we just play this one as is for a while?’ That’s what we’re doing. I’m sure when this show ends, we’ll start working on something else, but for now I’m enjoying what we’re doing.”

Indeed, Patti LuPone is one of the busiest performers in the American theater. From the Kennedy Center to the Ravinia Festival in Illinois, where she has done six Sondheim musicals (Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, Sunday in the Park with George, Passion and Anyone Can Whistle), at times it seems as if Patti LuPone is American musical theater. Still, she seems to have little sense of herself as a personality of historic proportion.

“Well I did play Evita,” she concedes, “and I did originate a role in Les Miz. I did do Sunset Boulevard. But no, I don’t. And I am better off not thinking that way. I’m living it!”

She does, however, enjoy the proximity to theater history that her star status provides.

“When I played the Fulton Street Opera House in Pennsylvania, I did feel a sense of history. I think Sarah Bernhardt played on that stage. When I played Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., I thought about the history of that theater. There are any number of places where I think, ‘Oh wow! I’m treading the same ground!’ When I played the St. James Theatre on Broadway [in Gypsy], I thought about that. [Stars from George M. Cohan to John Gielgud, and shows from The King and I to My Fair Lady have played the St. James]. When I played the Broadway Theatre, I knew that Ethel Merman had been there!” Presumably, Patti LuPone used Merman’s dressing room.

“If you have that information it is a lot of fun,” notes LuPone. “I do think there are ghosts in the theater, and they are a comforting presence. I felt the presence of ghosts in both the St. James and at the Eugene O’Neill [on Broadway], and was grateful.”

LuPone’s role in theater history includes her unlikely status as the successor to Ethel Merman. The two women are remarkably dissimilar, and yet two definitive Merman roles—Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes and Rose in Gypsy—have become signature roles for LuPone as well.

“Thank God I went to Juilliard!” quips LuPone, in response to the observation.

Indeed, Patti LuPone went to Juilliard. Famously, she was a member of the first graduating class of the Juilliard drama division. Her teacher, the legendary actor/produer John Houseman, so adored this group of talented acting students that he formed The Acting Company, in 1972, just to allow them to flaunt their skill. They quickly became the nation’s foremost touring repertory theater company. LuPone stayed with the prestigious company until 1976 and was featured in such plays as The School for Scandal, Women Beware Women, The Beggar’s Opera, The Time of Your Life, The Lower Depths, The Hostage, Next Time I’ll Sing to You, Measure for Measure, Scapin, Edward II, The Orchestra, Love’s Labours Lost, Arms and the Man, The Way of the World, and The Robber Bridegroom. For the latter, she received a Tony Award nomination.

LuPone’s longtime relationship with playwright David Mamet goes back to those formative years. She has left her indelible mark on a number of his plays, including All Men Are Whores (1977), The Woods (1977), The Blue Hour (1978), The Water Engine (1978), Edmund (1982), and The Old Neighborhood (1997).

“John Houseman commissioned David to write a play for the company before he was ‘David Mamet,’ recalls LuPone. “Six of us left the company before he wrote the play. But he took Kevin Kline and Sam Tsoutsovas and me, and we did All Men Are Whores at the Yale Cabaret, and I was there when he offered me The Woods. David and I have been associated with each other ever since. I mean, there might be a [Mamet] play for me in the future, and I really hope so. I would like to return to Broadway after Gypsy in a play by David. We’ll see!”

In the meantime, Buffalonians have an opportunity to see the incomparable Patti LuPone onstage with Mandy Patinkin on May 2. Tickets are priced at $100, $65, $55, and $35 and can be purchased online at www.sheas.org or at the Shea’s box office. Those who are interested in Gala tickets, which include preferred seating, can call 829-1172. Individual gala tickets are $275; Shea’s Performing Arts Center is a registered 501(c)(3) organization, and a portion of the ticket price is tax deductible. The gala includes cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and a silent auction. 5-6pm; a sit down gourmet dinner, 6-7:15pm; preferred seating to An Evening with Patti LuPone and Many Patinkin at 8pm; and a post show party with music, drinks, desserts, and coffee.