“Patti LuPone: A Memoir” by Patti LuPone with Digby Diehl, $25.99
When an actor is described as “turbulent” or “difficult,” it’s typically a euphemism for “a royal pain.” Patti LuPone, one of the most celebrated musical theater performers of her generation, wears her anger with a difference.
The role she casts herself in repeatedly in “Patti LuPone: A Memoir” is that of battling victim.
Frowned upon by snobs who don’t appreciate her Italian-American vibrancy, pigeonholed by critics who refuse to accept her as both a musical and dramatic force and exploited by money-hungry producers who want to wring her dry before discarding her, she reviews her theatrical career in the feisty, score-settling spirit of someone who’s been burned once too often and has made a vow with her lawyers never to let it happen again (even though, at 61, she knows it probably will).
As her pulverizing (and often polarizing) star turns might suggest, this diva doesn’t suffer fools gladly. There’s a ferocity to LuPone’s stage presence, a bulldozing theatricality that, when matched with the right tour de force opportunities, such as those she seized by the neck in “Evita,” “Anything Goes,” “Sweeney Todd” and “Gypsy,” is like a return to a golden age when powerhouses ruled Broadway.
The memoir is framed by LuPone’s hard-won triumph in “Gypsy.” She first performed in the show as a teen in her hometown of Northport, Long Island. But her saga with the musical really begins in 2006 at the Ravinia Festival in Highland Park, Ill., where the role everyone had been telling her for years she was born to play, that juggernaut of a stage mother indelibly created by Ethel Merman, would become a reality for three glorious nights outdoors in front of hordes of picnicking theatergoers.
Despite tepid reviews of a preview showing in New York, she opened in “Gypsy” at the St. James Theatre in 2008 to rapturous reviews. LuPone would go on to win her second Tony Award (her first was for “Evita”). “Vindication” is how she describes the feeling.
Andrew Lloyd Webber pulled the rug out from under her by nixing her participation in the Broadway premiere of “Sunset Boulevard,” and tops her list of manipulative monsters. We hear about LuPone’s anguished yet nonetheless tender love affair with a roving Kevin Kline that began at Juilliard and continued during their touring rep days with the Acting Company.
There’s a diatribe against Israeli actor Chaim Topol, whom she describes as “obnoxious, unprofessional, and verbally and physically abusive” during the abortive pre-Broadway run of the misbegotten musical “The Baker’s Wife.”
She’s still griping about the way John Houseman, one of the heads of the newly formed drama division at Juilliard that accepted her into its inaugural class, routinely gave her the shaft in student productions.
LuPone retraces her stage resume from her high school singing lessons through her predictably tumultuous London success in “Les Miserables” to the Broadway closing of “Gypsy.” The book seems to be written for aspiring thespians, a convenient cover for her confrontational candor.
Earnestness isn’t her strong suit. The kisses she blows to playwright David Mamet and “Evita” costar Mandy Patinkin represent her most lackluster prose.
As lacking in introspection as her tirades can be, LuPone’s voice is most alive when crackling with hostility. She may have unburdened herself of a lifetime of grudges with this memoir, but when she opens later this fall in the new Broadway musical “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” I expect to find her in fighting form.
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