Over a 50-year career she has sung lines written by musical theatre’s biggest names but the Tony award-winning star Patti LuPone fears that lyricists are being failed by today’s productions. “I cannot understand a lyric,” she said, referring to Broadway’s current wave of musicals.
LuPone blamed the problem on sound mixing that drowns out singing voices and actors who have not learned the art of projection because forehead microphones are now so widely used. “Young performers have no idea how to project,” she said, adding that they should ask themselves “who are you doing this for?” when on stage and remember “they are singing for the back row”.
LuPone makes a point of talking to those working on a production’s sound mixing desk, she explained, because singers are not always sufficiently distinguished from the volume of the orchestra. She tells a sound mixer how loud and soft her voice will go and warns, in reference to the equipment, “don’t ride the dials” to alter her performance. “It’s been a season of sets and volume,” she said of Broadway’s new musicals, drawing attention to the rocketing budgets for scenic design.
LuPone will bring the concert A Life in Notes, which she has toured in the US, to Australia later this month and then to the Coliseum in London, where reaching the back row is an art of its own. With 2,359 seats, it is the largest theatre in the West End. Her performance there on 16 February will be her biggest solo concert to date in the UK.
The show includes numbers from the musicals she has performed in to great acclaim including Don’t Cry for Me Argentina from Evita, I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables and The Ladies Who Lunch from Company. But it also includes many she had never previously sung on stage. “Growing up, I knew I had a voice destined for Broadway but I was a closet rocker,” she said. “My mother listened to opera and musical theatre, my father listened to jazz. I decided: I’m gonna rebel and listen to my own music.” Included in the early part of the concert are “the songs that affected me when I was young – I’d sing them in my house and on the beach”.
Her setlist features numbers from “the burgeoning of rock’n’roll in the 50s and 60s” including Teen Angel, recorded by Mark Dinning, and what she called other “teen tragedy” songs. The lyrics of Town Without Pity, recorded by Gene Pitney (“How can we keep love alive? / How can anything survive / When these little minds tear you in two?”) still resonate in today’s society, she said. The songs chart a path from her childhood in Long Island to “finding anonymity” in New York, becoming a Broadway star and living in the city during the 1980s Aids crisis.
LuPone’s last stage role in the West End was in Marianne Elliott’s 2018 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, which won her an Olivier award for best supporting actress in a musical. She then won a Tony award for playing the same role in New York. LuPone’s first trip to London was in 1971 to appear in a “lousy” rock musical, Iphigenia, at the Young Vic.
In recent years, LuPone has called for audiences to show greater respect in the theatre – for their fellow spectators as well as those on stage and other professionals. She said that this season on Broadway, behaviour had been better and that “nary a phone has gone off” during a performance. She said audio warnings about behaviour in the auditorium had been successful, especially “those announcements that have been recorded by cast members”.
The actor, 75, will return to Broadway this autumn alongside Mia Farrow in The Roommate, a play written by Jen Silverman. LuPone has had shoulder and hip replacement surgery in recent years and said that taking on a new musical role would be daunting as “it’s exhausting doing eight shows a week for a year”. Nevertheless, she added “I am built for musicals” and said she may yet be made an offer she cannot resist.
