NYT: Let Her Entertain You. Please!
Jul. 7th, 2007 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hesMs LuPone! :D
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
July 8, 2007
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
By JESSE GREEN
THE Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra was tuning up one day last month at the Ravinia Festival in suburban Chicago when Patti LuPone walked onstage in her let’s-get-serious glasses and prepared to sing from a score plastered with Post-it notes. Among the ensemble’s strange, outmoded, “original” instruments — the feral horns, sour violins, wooden flutes, cellos without endpins — she seemed right at home, despite her Broadway provenance. She too is a strange, outmoded, original instrument: a musical star built for another age, an Ethel Merman without portfolio.
Which partly explains what she was doing there: following the unpredictable trail of interesting work wherever it led. In this case that meant “To Hell and Back,” by the composer Jake Heggie and the librettist Gene Scheer. Reframing the Persephone myth as a contemporary tale of domestic abuse, they had conceived the 38-minute operatic piece with Ms. LuPone specifically in mind to sing the role of the battered wife’s mother-in-law. Even so, they were shocked when she jumped at the role before hearing the rangy, belty, extremely difficult part.
“Well, the story of women speaking up in the face of abuse is very important,” Ms. LuPone said later. “Plus, someone’s going to write me a role and I’m not going to do it?”
That people haven’t generally been writing her roles, as they surely would have in an earlier era, is the defining problem in a career that doesn’t so much resemble a path as a Rorschach blot, read it how you wish. Though Ms. LuPone was trained at Juilliard to be a dramatic actress capable of many kinds of characters, her enormous success in “Evita” in 1979 permanently pegged her as a musical star just as musicals were starting their final descent into cultural irrelevance. Despite her once-in-a-generation pipes, she would never again originate a role in a new musical in New York.
In London, where she feels her gifts are better understood, she did create Fantine in “Les Misérables” and, less happily, Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” Famously replaced by Glenn Close when that show came to Broadway in 1994, she sued its composer-producer; the out-of-court settlement financed what she calls the “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool” at a former home in Connecticut.
But Broadway’s failure to make the best use of her hasn’t always been so remunerative; mostly it has left her baffled and disappointed. The production photographs on her Web site, pattilupone.net, are peppered with captions like “Don’t ask” and “It’s such a long story” and “@#*!x*&#.” Strangely, the very qualities that once defined a Broadway star — having a big voice and personality — are now sometimes divisive; fans eat it up but critics reach for their most ambivalent phrasings. “Overpowering” cuts two ways.
Unsure what do in the face of such mixed messages (she has won only one Tony award, for “Evita,” out of four nominations), Ms. LuPone simply kept at it, going anywhere the work was: revivals, concert stagings, plays by her old pal David Mamet and the three one-woman shows she performs around the country many times a year. A steady but not stellar career in film and television means that more people may know her from four seasons of “Life Goes On” or her recent appearances on “Ugly Betty” and “Oz” than have ever seen her onstage.
But not to see her onstage is essentially not to see her, so it makes sense that she has recently turned to opera — not only “To Hell and Back” but also Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” at the Los Angeles Opera this year and “Regina” at the Kennedy Center in 2005. No one ever complained about an opera singer’s big voice or personality, whereas Ms. LuPone was once heckled at Grossinger’s by a woman shouting, “Too loud, Patti, too loud!”
Too loud, yes; Mr. Heggie calls her “a parade,” albeit one with “an incredible work ethic.” Michael Cerveris, her co-star in the 2005 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” said: “She’s more than capable of living up to every story you hear about her, outrageous as well as courageous. A night out with her is not for the faint-hearted. Neither is squaring off with her onstage, and I mean that as a compliment.” Which may be why producers want her but also seem to fear her, a combination that makes her oddly fatalistic.
“I’m not very ambitious,” she said one night over dinner at Ravinia, “except that I have to maintain a lifestyle.” (She and her husband, Matt Johnston, have a 16-year-old son, Josh, a new home in Connecticut and a beach house in South Carolina.) That she became a musical star was itself a kind of accident; she wouldn’t have auditioned for “Evita” were it not for the insistence of her boyfriend at the time, Kevin Kline. “I guess these things are divined,” she said hopefully.
That is certainly the case with “Gypsy,” which is to start performances on Monday at City Center in New York, under the aegis of the new Summer Stars series at Encores! Unlike the established winter and spring Encores! productions, which feature concert versions of musicals not often revived on Broadway (Ms. LuPone has done two of them, “Can-Can” and “Pal Joey”), “Gypsy” is fully staged, with Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, complete (if minimalist) sets and no one carrying a script. It’s a much bigger commitment for Encores!, costing more than four times as much as its typical show, and also a bigger commitment for Ms. LuPone. Instead of the usual 5 performances she will play 22.
Of course she’d have killed to play 220 or more. The drama of how she finally got to star as Rose in a New York production of the 1959 musical is almost a musical in itself, featuring pride, betrayal and some of the biggest characters in the American theater. But Rose is an even bigger character, the kind many people — including the show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim — feel Ms. LuPone was built to play.
It’s true she has the voice for it, and the relentless personality, “with the rebelliousness and volatility always dialed up to 10,” as she put it. And then there is the connection to Merman, for whom the role was written. (Ms. LuPone has already revived Merman’s turn in “Anything Goes,” and made no secret of her wish to star in that other classic Merman vehicle, “Annie Get Your Gun.”) But beyond that, Rose isn’t an obvious fit. She is a stage mother who pours her life’s worth of dammed-up ambition into her unwilling daughters because, as Arthur Laurents’s book for the musical memorably puts it, she was “born too soon and started too late.”
For Ms. LuPone, now 58, it was just the opposite.
Like most stage savants, she started too soon, at least if the goal was to establish vaguely normal relations with the outside world. By the age of 4, little Patti — named for the Italian soprano Adelina Patti, whom family lore claimed as a relative — was tap dancing at Ocean Avenue Elementary School in Northport on Long Island; soon she was waltzing with her older twin brothers as part of the LuPone Trio and performing in a beret and jazz skirt at hospitals for injured children. (“What’s wrong with this picture?” Ms. LuPone asked, recalling the scene.) As if her “peasant Sicilian temperament” weren’t enough, being raised among the chaotic passions of the stage — her parents divorced when she was 12 — meant absorbing an exaggerated sense of entitlement and betrayal along with the power and joy.
There was a time when musical roles that tapped all those extremes were regularly being written, and when producers accommodated the quirks of the stars who could embody them. But Ms. LuPone was born too late to enjoy that era, except in revival. What few new roles of stature have come along, she’s had trouble landing. It hasn’t helped that her reputation precedes her, though she feels it is largely the result of being tarred with the unpleasantness of the woman she first became famous playing.
“ ‘Evita’ was the worst experience of my life,” she said. “I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee.”
Her producers at Ravinia and at Encores! say that she is not in fact difficult, just fierce about professional standards and is, as such, a good company leader. “It’s true,” she said. “I will never back down unless I’m at gunpoint over behavior that is not conducive to being the best we can be.” But while others who have worked with her agree that she can be terrifically generous onstage and off, they also say that there are plenty of snits and tantrums, especially when things get tense on a production facing reviews, awards or early termination.
“But it’s never about diva things,” Ms. LuPone insisted, by which she meant she doesn’t live like a grand dame or haggle over perquisites. The standard rider to her contract stipulates things like approval of stage management, so she can feel safe from what she called the “goo” of incompetence around her — not masseurs or color-edited bowls of M&M’s.
Still, she’s convinced that her reputation has lost her roles she desperately wanted. (She sat crying her eyes out on her porch swing, she said, when she didn’t get to play Janice, Tony’s histrionic sister, on “The Sopranos.”) It certainly figured into the “Gypsy” drama, which started in 1995 when she was negotiating to play a role in a Seattle production of “Jolson Sings Again,” a semiautobiographical play about the Hollywood blacklist by Mr. Laurents.
The facts of the case are somewhat hazy, but from a distance it seems that a basically run-of-the-mill contract dispute (Ms. LuPone wanted guarantees that the show would come to New York and that she wouldn’t be dumped when it did) blew up into a blacklist of its own. She only found this out several years later, she said, when the director Sam Mendes was planning a new Broadway “Gypsy.” Ms. LuPone, who believed she was set to play Rose, was later informed that she was not “approved casting” for that production. Only Bernadette Peters, who’d done the “Annie Get Your Gun” revival that Ms. LuPone had coveted, was.
It turned out that Mr. Laurents, who as author of the book of “Gypsy” has veto power over casting of major productions, was still angry with Ms. LuPone for “walking out” on “Jolson Sings Again” and in effect banned her. But bans have a way of fading with time, while the dream — or in Ms. LuPone’s case almost the necessity — of playing classic roles does not.
In 2001 she started performing in a series of annual summer concerts at Ravinia, directed by Lonny Price and dedicated to the work of Mr. Sondheim. Sometimes accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, sometimes by cicadas, she loved getting to play such complicated characters as Fosca, Mrs. Lovett and Desirée Armfeldt in seat-of-the-pants productions with the emphasis pared to acting and singing. As she was “working her way through the canon,” as Mr. Sondheim put it, Rose remained an immovable object looming on the horizon. Because these were concert stagings and not in New York, the casting was not within Mr. Laurents’s purview; finally, last summer, she got to play Rose, and blew the house down.
It was not the Ravinia performance that softened Mr. Laurents toward Ms. LuPone; he didn’t see it. Nor was it her appearance as Mrs. Lovett in the Broadway “Sweeney Todd” revival, which he did see, and admired. It was instead something simpler and more ineffable. At the suggestion of Scott Rudin, who had been a producer of “Jolson Sings Again” and was now providing enhancement financing to the City Center “Gypsy,” Ms. LuPone telephoned Mr. Laurents. Not just because he controlled the casting but also because he was directing the production, as he had directed the ones that featured Angela Lansbury in 1974 and Tyne Daly in 1989.
It meant swallowing her pride, she said, but “it was the smartest thing I could have done.”
Mr. Laurents agreed. “We talked for three hours, and I told her exactly what I thought,” he said during a lunch break between rehearsals at City Center. “And we decided we were going to start from scratch with ‘Gypsy.’ Not with our lives. We didn’t have any lives together. And in only two days this is already one of the best times I’ve ever had in the theater. I don’t care what happens. It’s worth it for this.”
That seemed a strangely fast and neat denouement to the story, especially for two characters not known for temperate reactions or letting go of grudges.
“Everybody does things they shouldn’t,” Mr. Laurents acknowledged. “But at my age” — he will be 89 on July 14 — “do you think I’m going to worry about the past? I had the most important person in my life die in October.” He was referring to Tom Hatcher, his partner of 52 years. “Well, that changes your perspective. I don’t care as much about the theater as I used to, and with all due respect to Patti and everybody else, if it takes something like this to make me care at all, something where I thought, ‘This could be exciting,’ that’s the only reason I’m doing it.”
That and the fact, Mr. Laurents added quietly, that Mr. Hatcher, as he was dying, told him to.
For Ms. LuPone, so much has been determined by unknowable factors that she’s all but given up on trying to plan what comes next. After “Gypsy” she has very little on her schedule except her one-woman shows and next season at Ravinia, where she may do another Sondheim or the Brecht-Weill “Seven Deadly Sins.” Or perhaps Mr. Rudin will take her Rose to London. Meantime, waiting for a new job to summon her, she sometimes sits at home wondering why she is sitting at home.
“That’s the problem today,” she said after a performance of “To Hell and Back” at Ravinia. “You can’t grow with the creators of new works and they can’t grow with you. Too much is on the line financially.”
But Ms. LuPone also knows that she’s probably had more interesting opportunities in unexpected places than she would ever have had on Broadway. Who’s to say that “To Hell and Back” isn’t worthier of her time and passion than “Annie Get Your Gun” or even “Gypsy”?
In any case her complaint quickly flipped into glee when she got outside. Still carrying her costume, she sweet-talked a security guard into handing over the keys to a golf cart, which she then drove maniacally down one wrong path after another. Supposedly she was heading to the parking lot, but the moonlit walkways glowed white against the Ravinia greensward, and it seemed more likely that Ms. LuPone wanted to sample every one of them in turn.
“Isn’t this fun!” she shouted into the night, cackling and careening as the security guard tried to point her in the right direction. “But where the hell am I going?”
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
July 8, 2007
Let Her Entertain You. Please!
By JESSE GREEN
THE Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra was tuning up one day last month at the Ravinia Festival in suburban Chicago when Patti LuPone walked onstage in her let’s-get-serious glasses and prepared to sing from a score plastered with Post-it notes. Among the ensemble’s strange, outmoded, “original” instruments — the feral horns, sour violins, wooden flutes, cellos without endpins — she seemed right at home, despite her Broadway provenance. She too is a strange, outmoded, original instrument: a musical star built for another age, an Ethel Merman without portfolio.
Which partly explains what she was doing there: following the unpredictable trail of interesting work wherever it led. In this case that meant “To Hell and Back,” by the composer Jake Heggie and the librettist Gene Scheer. Reframing the Persephone myth as a contemporary tale of domestic abuse, they had conceived the 38-minute operatic piece with Ms. LuPone specifically in mind to sing the role of the battered wife’s mother-in-law. Even so, they were shocked when she jumped at the role before hearing the rangy, belty, extremely difficult part.
“Well, the story of women speaking up in the face of abuse is very important,” Ms. LuPone said later. “Plus, someone’s going to write me a role and I’m not going to do it?”
That people haven’t generally been writing her roles, as they surely would have in an earlier era, is the defining problem in a career that doesn’t so much resemble a path as a Rorschach blot, read it how you wish. Though Ms. LuPone was trained at Juilliard to be a dramatic actress capable of many kinds of characters, her enormous success in “Evita” in 1979 permanently pegged her as a musical star just as musicals were starting their final descent into cultural irrelevance. Despite her once-in-a-generation pipes, she would never again originate a role in a new musical in New York.
In London, where she feels her gifts are better understood, she did create Fantine in “Les Misérables” and, less happily, Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” Famously replaced by Glenn Close when that show came to Broadway in 1994, she sued its composer-producer; the out-of-court settlement financed what she calls the “Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool” at a former home in Connecticut.
But Broadway’s failure to make the best use of her hasn’t always been so remunerative; mostly it has left her baffled and disappointed. The production photographs on her Web site, pattilupone.net, are peppered with captions like “Don’t ask” and “It’s such a long story” and “@#*!x*&#.” Strangely, the very qualities that once defined a Broadway star — having a big voice and personality — are now sometimes divisive; fans eat it up but critics reach for their most ambivalent phrasings. “Overpowering” cuts two ways.
Unsure what do in the face of such mixed messages (she has won only one Tony award, for “Evita,” out of four nominations), Ms. LuPone simply kept at it, going anywhere the work was: revivals, concert stagings, plays by her old pal David Mamet and the three one-woman shows she performs around the country many times a year. A steady but not stellar career in film and television means that more people may know her from four seasons of “Life Goes On” or her recent appearances on “Ugly Betty” and “Oz” than have ever seen her onstage.
But not to see her onstage is essentially not to see her, so it makes sense that she has recently turned to opera — not only “To Hell and Back” but also Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” at the Los Angeles Opera this year and “Regina” at the Kennedy Center in 2005. No one ever complained about an opera singer’s big voice or personality, whereas Ms. LuPone was once heckled at Grossinger’s by a woman shouting, “Too loud, Patti, too loud!”
Too loud, yes; Mr. Heggie calls her “a parade,” albeit one with “an incredible work ethic.” Michael Cerveris, her co-star in the 2005 revival of “Sweeney Todd,” said: “She’s more than capable of living up to every story you hear about her, outrageous as well as courageous. A night out with her is not for the faint-hearted. Neither is squaring off with her onstage, and I mean that as a compliment.” Which may be why producers want her but also seem to fear her, a combination that makes her oddly fatalistic.
“I’m not very ambitious,” she said one night over dinner at Ravinia, “except that I have to maintain a lifestyle.” (She and her husband, Matt Johnston, have a 16-year-old son, Josh, a new home in Connecticut and a beach house in South Carolina.) That she became a musical star was itself a kind of accident; she wouldn’t have auditioned for “Evita” were it not for the insistence of her boyfriend at the time, Kevin Kline. “I guess these things are divined,” she said hopefully.
That is certainly the case with “Gypsy,” which is to start performances on Monday at City Center in New York, under the aegis of the new Summer Stars series at Encores! Unlike the established winter and spring Encores! productions, which feature concert versions of musicals not often revived on Broadway (Ms. LuPone has done two of them, “Can-Can” and “Pal Joey”), “Gypsy” is fully staged, with Jerome Robbins’s original choreography, complete (if minimalist) sets and no one carrying a script. It’s a much bigger commitment for Encores!, costing more than four times as much as its typical show, and also a bigger commitment for Ms. LuPone. Instead of the usual 5 performances she will play 22.
Of course she’d have killed to play 220 or more. The drama of how she finally got to star as Rose in a New York production of the 1959 musical is almost a musical in itself, featuring pride, betrayal and some of the biggest characters in the American theater. But Rose is an even bigger character, the kind many people — including the show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim — feel Ms. LuPone was built to play.
It’s true she has the voice for it, and the relentless personality, “with the rebelliousness and volatility always dialed up to 10,” as she put it. And then there is the connection to Merman, for whom the role was written. (Ms. LuPone has already revived Merman’s turn in “Anything Goes,” and made no secret of her wish to star in that other classic Merman vehicle, “Annie Get Your Gun.”) But beyond that, Rose isn’t an obvious fit. She is a stage mother who pours her life’s worth of dammed-up ambition into her unwilling daughters because, as Arthur Laurents’s book for the musical memorably puts it, she was “born too soon and started too late.”
For Ms. LuPone, now 58, it was just the opposite.
Like most stage savants, she started too soon, at least if the goal was to establish vaguely normal relations with the outside world. By the age of 4, little Patti — named for the Italian soprano Adelina Patti, whom family lore claimed as a relative — was tap dancing at Ocean Avenue Elementary School in Northport on Long Island; soon she was waltzing with her older twin brothers as part of the LuPone Trio and performing in a beret and jazz skirt at hospitals for injured children. (“What’s wrong with this picture?” Ms. LuPone asked, recalling the scene.) As if her “peasant Sicilian temperament” weren’t enough, being raised among the chaotic passions of the stage — her parents divorced when she was 12 — meant absorbing an exaggerated sense of entitlement and betrayal along with the power and joy.
There was a time when musical roles that tapped all those extremes were regularly being written, and when producers accommodated the quirks of the stars who could embody them. But Ms. LuPone was born too late to enjoy that era, except in revival. What few new roles of stature have come along, she’s had trouble landing. It hasn’t helped that her reputation precedes her, though she feels it is largely the result of being tarred with the unpleasantness of the woman she first became famous playing.
“ ‘Evita’ was the worst experience of my life,” she said. “I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee.”
Her producers at Ravinia and at Encores! say that she is not in fact difficult, just fierce about professional standards and is, as such, a good company leader. “It’s true,” she said. “I will never back down unless I’m at gunpoint over behavior that is not conducive to being the best we can be.” But while others who have worked with her agree that she can be terrifically generous onstage and off, they also say that there are plenty of snits and tantrums, especially when things get tense on a production facing reviews, awards or early termination.
“But it’s never about diva things,” Ms. LuPone insisted, by which she meant she doesn’t live like a grand dame or haggle over perquisites. The standard rider to her contract stipulates things like approval of stage management, so she can feel safe from what she called the “goo” of incompetence around her — not masseurs or color-edited bowls of M&M’s.
Still, she’s convinced that her reputation has lost her roles she desperately wanted. (She sat crying her eyes out on her porch swing, she said, when she didn’t get to play Janice, Tony’s histrionic sister, on “The Sopranos.”) It certainly figured into the “Gypsy” drama, which started in 1995 when she was negotiating to play a role in a Seattle production of “Jolson Sings Again,” a semiautobiographical play about the Hollywood blacklist by Mr. Laurents.
The facts of the case are somewhat hazy, but from a distance it seems that a basically run-of-the-mill contract dispute (Ms. LuPone wanted guarantees that the show would come to New York and that she wouldn’t be dumped when it did) blew up into a blacklist of its own. She only found this out several years later, she said, when the director Sam Mendes was planning a new Broadway “Gypsy.” Ms. LuPone, who believed she was set to play Rose, was later informed that she was not “approved casting” for that production. Only Bernadette Peters, who’d done the “Annie Get Your Gun” revival that Ms. LuPone had coveted, was.
It turned out that Mr. Laurents, who as author of the book of “Gypsy” has veto power over casting of major productions, was still angry with Ms. LuPone for “walking out” on “Jolson Sings Again” and in effect banned her. But bans have a way of fading with time, while the dream — or in Ms. LuPone’s case almost the necessity — of playing classic roles does not.
In 2001 she started performing in a series of annual summer concerts at Ravinia, directed by Lonny Price and dedicated to the work of Mr. Sondheim. Sometimes accompanied by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, sometimes by cicadas, she loved getting to play such complicated characters as Fosca, Mrs. Lovett and Desirée Armfeldt in seat-of-the-pants productions with the emphasis pared to acting and singing. As she was “working her way through the canon,” as Mr. Sondheim put it, Rose remained an immovable object looming on the horizon. Because these were concert stagings and not in New York, the casting was not within Mr. Laurents’s purview; finally, last summer, she got to play Rose, and blew the house down.
It was not the Ravinia performance that softened Mr. Laurents toward Ms. LuPone; he didn’t see it. Nor was it her appearance as Mrs. Lovett in the Broadway “Sweeney Todd” revival, which he did see, and admired. It was instead something simpler and more ineffable. At the suggestion of Scott Rudin, who had been a producer of “Jolson Sings Again” and was now providing enhancement financing to the City Center “Gypsy,” Ms. LuPone telephoned Mr. Laurents. Not just because he controlled the casting but also because he was directing the production, as he had directed the ones that featured Angela Lansbury in 1974 and Tyne Daly in 1989.
It meant swallowing her pride, she said, but “it was the smartest thing I could have done.”
Mr. Laurents agreed. “We talked for three hours, and I told her exactly what I thought,” he said during a lunch break between rehearsals at City Center. “And we decided we were going to start from scratch with ‘Gypsy.’ Not with our lives. We didn’t have any lives together. And in only two days this is already one of the best times I’ve ever had in the theater. I don’t care what happens. It’s worth it for this.”
That seemed a strangely fast and neat denouement to the story, especially for two characters not known for temperate reactions or letting go of grudges.
“Everybody does things they shouldn’t,” Mr. Laurents acknowledged. “But at my age” — he will be 89 on July 14 — “do you think I’m going to worry about the past? I had the most important person in my life die in October.” He was referring to Tom Hatcher, his partner of 52 years. “Well, that changes your perspective. I don’t care as much about the theater as I used to, and with all due respect to Patti and everybody else, if it takes something like this to make me care at all, something where I thought, ‘This could be exciting,’ that’s the only reason I’m doing it.”
That and the fact, Mr. Laurents added quietly, that Mr. Hatcher, as he was dying, told him to.
For Ms. LuPone, so much has been determined by unknowable factors that she’s all but given up on trying to plan what comes next. After “Gypsy” she has very little on her schedule except her one-woman shows and next season at Ravinia, where she may do another Sondheim or the Brecht-Weill “Seven Deadly Sins.” Or perhaps Mr. Rudin will take her Rose to London. Meantime, waiting for a new job to summon her, she sometimes sits at home wondering why she is sitting at home.
“That’s the problem today,” she said after a performance of “To Hell and Back” at Ravinia. “You can’t grow with the creators of new works and they can’t grow with you. Too much is on the line financially.”
But Ms. LuPone also knows that she’s probably had more interesting opportunities in unexpected places than she would ever have had on Broadway. Who’s to say that “To Hell and Back” isn’t worthier of her time and passion than “Annie Get Your Gun” or even “Gypsy”?
In any case her complaint quickly flipped into glee when she got outside. Still carrying her costume, she sweet-talked a security guard into handing over the keys to a golf cart, which she then drove maniacally down one wrong path after another. Supposedly she was heading to the parking lot, but the moonlit walkways glowed white against the Ravinia greensward, and it seemed more likely that Ms. LuPone wanted to sample every one of them in turn.
“Isn’t this fun!” she shouted into the night, cackling and careening as the security guard tried to point her in the right direction. “But where the hell am I going?”