Everything’s Coming Up Roses

Patti LuPone with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Rob Fisher singing Everything’s Coming Up Roses from the musical “Gypsy”

“Woe unto ye who deprive La LuPone of applause.” - Ben Brantley

At this stage in her career, Patti LuPone isn’t so much an actress or a singer, as she is a religion. Come followers, and worship at the altar of The Great LuPone…just don’t take any pictures.

On Friday night, the believers (obnoxious gay guys and the women who love them) came, sure enough, for reasons that seemed to exist outside the realm of hearing great American music delivered by an exceptional artist. For those of us that are mere fans of Ms. LuPone, the evening was a disappointing fizzle, but that hardly seemed to matter to the people sitting around me. There were thunderous ovations even before the music, or Ms. LuPone, began.

The evening really belonged to the magnificent Rob Fisher (the man responsible for turning “Encores!” into the Met Orchestra) conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra with verve and sweeping vigor. It was wonderful to have this first-rate orchestra playing great American standards under the baton of a man who knows this music inside and out.

The first half of the everything was strictly instrumental. Mr. Fisher started with the overture to “Funny Girl” then various selections from “Sweeney Todd” and “West Side Story.” The arrangements were decidedly tasteful with Mr. Fisher emphasizing the pungent chromaticism in Stephen Sondheim’s and Leonard Bernstein’s scores without milking any of the lyricism for bombast or sentimentality. The “West Side Story” selections were especially thrilling. Having seen the disappointing revival on Broadway a few seasons ago, I began to think that the score to “West Side Story” could almost be a symphony or a tone poem.

Finally, it was time for all the believers to pray at The Church of Latter-day Patti. She came out in a full blaze of glory, basking in the thunderous ovations which seemed almost perfunctory. I knew the evening’s running time would be extended by, at least, an hour to accommodate all the erroneous applause. In addition, I should have brought earplugs to muffle the shrill gay squawks that were all too omnipresent throughout the performance. At times, it felt like I was standing in the center of an “I Love Patti More!” competition, with every member of the audience proving how much louder and annoying they could be than the person sitting next to them.

Anyway, LuPone seemed happy to be onstage and the audience was happy to have her there. She looked relaxed and very glamorous in a beautiful, glittering black pants-suit with a flattering chiffon robe. She started the evening off appropriately with, “Broadway” from “Gypsy,” taking momentary asides to converse with the audience and talk about what a “dream come true” it was to perform at Symphony Hall…um. okay?

Then she set the tone for the rest of the evening by exclaiming, “I’m going to sing every song from every role I EVER wanted to play! Or could have played, would’ve played, should’ve played…or did play.” the audience chuckled. She continued, “Now, some of the roles I did play, I didn’t want to play. And some of the roles I played I guess I shouldn’t have played according to the New York Times!” the percussionist provided a “ba-dum ching!” and the audience roared. It was these kinds of cutesy, self-referential anecdotes that peppered the evening, gave me hives and made the audience giddy with “Glee” that they could barely contain.

While she’s clearly at home onstage these days, I could have done without the snippets of her life story and her insider jokes. While not stilted or uncomfortable, it all came off as highly manufactured and insincere. It was when she sang that the evening veered back on course but, in that department, it wasn’t exactly a home-run either.

The program was pretty much what I suspected it would be. A smattering of Broadway favorites, a couple of unknown pieces, and the signature songs she’s become indelibly linked to and expected to sing these days.

The high points included a surprisingly straightforward version of “An English Teacher” form “Bye Bye Birdie,” a beautifully introspective rendition of “A Quiet Thing” from “Flora the Red Menace” and ”The Way You Look Tonight” with an Andrews Sisters style rearrangement where she used a disposable camera to take pictures of the audience…haha…eh. Another welcome surprise was a song called “Meadowlark” from “The Baker’s Wife.”

I had mixed feelings about “Don’t Rain On My Parade” and “Everything’s Coming Up Roses.” While she certainly has the chords to sing a song like “Parade” her slushy diction and lack of any personal stamp left me wondering why she would want to sing this song. It’s baffling when you consider what an idiosyncratic performer she is. Like the rest of the world, I was in love with her Mama Rose back in 2008, but “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” left me cold and nostalgic for the when I’d seen it performed on Broadway. Stripped of it’s context, the song seemed like just another diva showpiece. The two songs might have just as well been titled “Don’t Rain On Patti’s Parade” and “Everything’s Coming Up Patti.”

Of course there was “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina,” which gave me dyspepsia, but sent the audience into wild, rabid ecstasy. All she had to do was lift her arms, and hoards of screams, hoots, cheers and mouth-foaming began. I’m just so sick of this song it’s hard to be objective about it, but she clearly gave the people what they wanted and that was all that mattered.

The two glaring missteps of the evening were “A Wonderful Guy” set to a bossa nova arrangement and “Never Never Land” which just simply wasn’t right for her voice. Her diction was very muddled during “A Wonderful Guy” and she was rhythmically imprecise so much as to throw off the players and the conductor. There was no emotional investment which is a death sentence for this song.  “Never Never Land,” the sweet lyrical ballad from “Peter Pan,” was played sumptuously by the orchestra, but LuPone shouted the phrases with a stridency of tone as to make the selection seem almost ironic…or misguided.

Her voice, over all, was in fine shape (perhaps a tad thin these days). But past criticisms of her singing remain valid - the occasional tendency to slide off pitch, mushy diction, the over oscillating vibrato - the only thing that bothers me is her problem with phrasing. In musical theater, words are paramount. If you can’t understand the text, the listener becomes disengaged. The abysmal amplification didn’t help matters.

In the end, this is a concert about Patti LuPone and anyone who attends should expect as much. I guess I just prefer her in a musical inhabiting a character. She’s given me some of my most memorable nights at the theater both in “Sweeney Todd” and “Gypsy.” It all depends on where you stand as a fan of hers. If you’re interested in Patti LuPone: go see her in concert. If you’re interested in Patti LuPone the great singing actress: wait for her to return to Broadway in another knockout role.

NOTE: I’ll be posting audio clips later so you can decide for yourself.

Hurricane LuPone sweeps into town on Friday to perform with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. I Don’t Give a Fach will be there to report back with all the gory details. I’m tempted to bring a camera, with a big flash, so I can have my very own YouTube moment.

A very poignant and insightful article by one of my favorite theater critics writers. We often forget how potent words can be, even when they commingle with music…

May 6, 2011

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Arthur Laurents might have secured his place in the musical-theater pantheon with just three words: “Sing out, Louise!”

As any lover of Broadway musicals knows, that is the first line spoken — or rather bellowed — by Momma Rose, the monster mother in “Gypsy,” as she races down the aisle of a dingy Seattle theater to take charge of an audition going awry. With those three words Momma Rose instantly claims her place as one of the most vital, funny and memorable characters in the history of the American stage. And she does it without singing a note.

Almost everything we need to know about Rose is packed into that little phrase: her vulgarity and boldness, a bit of her desperation, perhaps. Certainly her domineering relationship with her daughter, and maybe her own unrecognized need for the spotlight, which is the furious internal engine that drives what many consider to be the greatest Broadway musical of all time.

Writing the book for a Broadway show must surely be among the more thankless tasks in the entertainment business. If the show works, the composer and lyricist will be showered in glory, or maybe the director and choreographer. If it doesn’t, chances are pretty good that its failure will be chalked up to the book’s author. The intensely collaborative nature of a musical tends to be forgotten when time comes to apportion blame.

Mr. Laurents, who died at 93 on Thursday, also supplied the book for the landmark musical “West Side Story.” He practically stands alone as a writer who owes his lasting fame to his authorship of two great musical books. While the scores for both “West Side Story” (by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) and “Gypsy” (by Jule Styne and Mr. Sondheim) are among the most highly prized in the canon, and the dances by Jerome Robbins remain a pinnacle of the choreographer’s art, the dramatic integrity of Mr. Laurents’s contributions are of equal importance in keeping those shows viable onstage.

It’s amusing to note that the notoriously pugnacious Mr. Laurents, who never met a score he didn’t want to settle, was involved in two of the most fruitful (if often fraught) collaborations in musical-theater history. From the collisions of artists can arise work that doesn’t just benefit from the tensions of the collaborative process, but somehow embodies them: dance, drama and song are as tightly integrated in both “Gypsy” and “West Side Story” as they are in any major American musical.

That might not have been the case if it weren’t for Mr. Laurents. His book for “West Side Story” was notable for its stylized argot, which sounded like the scrappy talk of street toughs but was largely his own original patois. But it was more radical in its terseness and economy, its willingness to allow inarticulate characters to establish the rhythms of their lives and relationships through physical movement. It was Mr. Laurents’s notion to begin the show with an almost wordless sequence for the rival gangs — hardly what you’d expect from an established playwright with a solid ego.

Robbins, the director and choreographer of both musicals, conceived of “Gypsy” as a splashy “panorama of vaudeville and burlesque.” Mr. Laurents fought to place the figure of Rose, the stage mother to end them all, at the center of the show. As a result “Gypsy” became a musical that anatomizes the pathology of ambition and the need for love with a trenchant humor that makes the show as vividly alive today as it was when it opened in 1959.

For all the glory of Rose’s potent arias in “Gypsy,” the character’s fierce will and emotional obtuseness — and the damage they inflict on her family — are established strongly in the book scenes, despite their admirable economy.

The parting between Rose and her would-be husband Herbie has both a sad, sour potency and one of Mr. Laurents’s immortally terse lines. When a desperate Rose tells Herbie that she needs him “for a million things,” he responds, “Just one would be better.”

And while “Gypsy” is famous for the electrifying emotional breakdown in song that provides the show with its climax, the brief scene between Rose and her daughter that follows it exemplifies how Mr. Laurents and his collaborators moved “Gypsy” beyond traditional musical comedy, just as they had recreated the musical as a more integrated form of lyric theater with “West Side Story” two years before.

The central theme of “Gypsy,” the destructive potential in the yearning for acceptance, is encapsulated in a few beats of dialogue, as Louise, now Gypsy Rose Lee, joins Rose onstage and finally asks the question: What drove her mother so relentlessly to seek the spotlight for her daughters, even if its heat burned away their love for her?

“Just wanted to be noticed,” Rose answers, in a moment of defeated illumination.

“Like I wanted you to notice me,” Louise replies.

In a dozen words: two lives, infinite loss, and a devastating coda to an immortal work of musical theater.

HAPPY MOTHERS DAY!