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    How Directors Are Reimagining Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Shows

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    The closing of “The Phantom of the Opera” last spring left a chandelier-sized hole in New York. And as of this summer, for the first time in 44 years, there is no Andrew Lloyd Webber musical running on Broadway.But now comes an unexpected new chapter in the career of one of musical theater’s most successful, if not always appreciated, composers: Several adventurous contemporary directors are declaring they love his work and want to put their stamp on it.Ivo van Hove, the Belgian director known for his profuse use of video and viscous fluids, is tackling “Jesus Christ Superstar” in Amsterdam, while Jamie Lloyd, the British auteur with a penchant for Pinter and an aversion to scenery, is sharpening “Sunset Boulevard” in London. Meanwhile, in the United States, Sammi Cannold is putting a feminist stamp on “Evita,” while Bill Rauch and Zhailon Levingston are humanizing “Cats.”The shows, and Lloyd Webber himself, occupy a paradoxical place in the theatrical canon.Critics have sometimes dismissed his work as overwrought. This newspaper’s reviewers, in particular, have often been underwhelmed, initially declaring that “Jesus Christ Superstar” had “minimal artistic value,” and also deriding “Evita” (“like reading endless footnotes from which the text has disappeared”), “Cats” (“if you blink, you’ll miss the plot”) and “Sunset Boulevard” (“lurid”).But “Evita,” “Cats” and “Sunset Boulevard” won best musical Tony Awards, and all four shows are widely staged and enormously popular. These new productions, reflecting contemporary trends, are emphasizing psychology and politics over spectacle and sentiment.Lloyd Webber, 75, said in an interview that there is no grand strategy at work here — that the directors individually sought permission to stage the shows. But he also said he believes that it is healthy to allow others to explore older material in new ways.“When we were approached, we just thought, ‘Well, great! Why not?’” he said. “You can’t just sit on these things.”Even “Starlight Express,” one of his zanier musicals, which involves actors on roller skates pretending to be trains, is getting a reboot: Luke Sheppard, the “& Juliet” director, is reimagining it for a run scheduled to begin next summer in London.The productions come after a rough patch for Lloyd Webber. His latest musical, “Bad Cinderella,” bombed on Broadway last spring, shortly after the “Phantom” closing. But he is undeterred: In August he signed with Creative Artists Agency, the powerhouse talent representatives, and in September he named a new chief executive for Really Useful Group, the company he owns that licenses and manages his shows.“I really must concentrate, in the latter days of my composing life, on creating and writing,” Lloyd Webber said. “It’s exciting to me that there are so many directors now coming forward, who actually are the directors who everybody is going to at the moment. And it’s very interesting to me to hear new minds and see new ideas — some of them I’m going to like and some of them not. But why not? I can’t see any possible reason.”Here is a look at four upcoming reinventions.London‘Sunset Boulevard’Forget the staircase and the turban. Jamie Lloyd is bringing an intense interest in psychological exploration to “Sunset Boulevard” — “putting the emphasis,” he says, “on people and their emotional journey.”With that aim, he asked Lloyd Webber to rework some aspects of the score “to lean into the darkness and peculiarity of certain moments that are dreamlike or nightmarish.” And, to his surprise, Lloyd Webber agreed. “He’s been so open,” Lloyd said, “which is kind of crazy.”The production, which is now running at London’s Savoy Theater, ends with a rush of blood and integrates live camera work in a nod to the Hollywood milieu of “Sunset Boulevard.” Lloyd called it “a hybrid between theater and cinema.”Lloyd, 42, didn’t grow up seeing theater. But his father, a truck driver, liked listening to show tunes, and that’s how Lloyd first encountered Lloyd Webber’s songs.The original Broadway production of “Sunset Boulevard,” which opened in 1994, starred Glenn Close, above with Andrew Lloyd Webber.Associated PressSoon he had his own cassette of the composer’s greatest hits, and he would “force my cousins to do performances in the living room.”“It was kind of the soundtrack of my youth,” he said.Fast forward to the summer of 2019. Lloyd, by then an acclaimed experimental director, had moved on from his Lloyd Webber fixation, or at least so he thought. But when he was invited to stage a musical outdoors, in Regent’s Park, one show came to mind: “Evita.”His sneakers-and-spray-paint production of that show was a hit, and he made a mental note of Lloyd Webber’s openness to “radical reappraisal.” Then, idled at home during the pandemic, he found himself imagining what he could do with “Sunset Boulevard.”“The characters he chooses to write about are weird and otherworldly, often with tormented minds, and the scores take these big leaps which are good to explore,” Lloyd said. “They are like fever dreams, and they respond well to a more experimental, less traditional approach.”WASHINGTON‘Evita’Sammi Cannold has long been obsessed with “Evita.” At 29, she is 16 years younger than the musical, but she still remembers hearing the songs as a kid in New York, seeing the revival that starred Ricky Martin, and, as an aspiring director, proclaiming it her “dream project.”She has been nothing if not determined: She directed a production while an undergrad at Stanford; she visited Argentina three times to do research; and then she pitched an “Evita” revival to New York City Center.In 1979, Patti LuPone (above with Bob Gunton) took on the role of Eva Perón for the show’s Broadway premiere.Martha Swope/New York Public LibrarySo in 2019, there was Cannold, directing a 12-day gala run of the Lloyd Webber classic. The production was eye-catching, starting with Evita’s iconic white ball gown hovering like a ghost over a flower-bedecked stage. This year, Cannold was able to develop it fully, staging it first at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., and now (through Oct. 15) at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, where the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called the show “gorgeously reinvigorated.”Cannold’s take is informed by feminism — “I think she’s a victim and a survivor who learned to use her sexuality as armor,” she said of Perón — but also by the regime’s authoritarianism. “When I first started working on it, I was head over heels in love with Eva — I was so obsessed with her and her history, and I couldn’t really hear any of the criticism,” she said. “I’ve gone on a whole journey, and land in a different place.”AMSTERDAM‘Jesus Christ Superstar’Even in Belgium, where Ivo van Hove grew up, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was a big deal. The concept album was released in 1970, when van Hove was young, and the music has lived in his head ever since.“At the time that I was an adolescent, this was huge — not the musical, but the album — the album was something that everybody bought,” said van Hove, who at 64 has never seen a stage production of the show. “Nobody could believe that ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ could be a rock thing.”Van Hove, whose production of “Dead Man Walking” is this season’s Metropolitan Opera opener, said he has wanted for years to direct “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “Some projects live in me for a long time,” he said.Jeff Fenholt in the title role of “Jesus Christ Superstar” on Broadway in 1971. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesNow he’s getting his chance, directing an English-language production that is set to begin performances in January at DeLaMar in Amsterdam.“I can tell you what interests me,” he said. “First, it’s a story of a group of friends who became friends because they believed in one mission: to take care of the poor. Second, these friends become a threat to political and religious leaders. And third are the geopolitical tensions, in this case with Rome.”“These things,” he added, “feel like very contemporary themes.”How contemporary? Let’s just say that in van Hove’s production, the cast will begin the show wearing hoodies. And, he said, some members of the audience will be seated onstage, because he wants to create a “pressure-cooker” environment.What is van Hove’s theory about why Lloyd Webber is drawing inventive directors now? “It’s not for nothing that these musicals became so important for so many people for such a long time,” he said. “There’s something very human there, even when it’s about cats.”NEW YORK‘Cats’The production of “Cats” planned for next June at the new Perelman Performing Arts Center is, at least at first blush, the most outlandish of this latest round of Lloyd Webber productions. Whereas the original concerned a group of cats (obviously) and was set in a junkyard, the characters in this production will be human beings, and it will be set in the Ballroom scene, a dance subculture closely associated with Black and Latino drag queens.“We are reimagining ‘Cats’ as a queer ball competition,” said Zhailon Levingston, one of the production’s two directors. Old Deuteronomy, an astute and admired character, will be head judge.The idea was the brainchild of the Perelman Center’s artistic director, Bill Rauch, who, by his own description, has been “obsessed with reinventing classics my whole career,” and who had previously directed a “queer ‘Oklahoma’” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. “Over the course of that process, I was thinking a lot about ‘Cats,’ and I just kept thinking about the song ‘Memory’ being done in a queer context,” Rauch said. “And I just found it very moving.”The cast of “Cats” in 1997; the show ran on Broadway from 1982 to 2000.Carol RoseggRauch, 61, saw the original Broadway production — albeit late in its long run, when he decided “it felt important to check that off on my cultural bucket list.” Levingston, 29, had a different point of entry: a direct-to-video film from 1998.“I’d be at the day care center, watching ‘Barney,’ and they kept showing the trailer for ‘Cats,’ and I didn’t know what they were doing — people were dressed provocatively, and it seemed like maybe we shouldn’t be watching, and one day my mom and I were at Blockbuster, and I saw the black box with the yellow eyes, and said, ‘We have to get that,’” he recalled. “For two years of my life, I would just watch ‘Cats.’”At one point, Levingston said, he even performed his own one-man (well, one-child) version of the show for his babysitters.Now Rauch and Levingston have hired choreographers with a connection to the Ballroom scene, and a gender consultant to help them navigate the complexities of a gender-nonconforming cast.“The more time we spend with the material,” Rauch said, “the deeper my respect grows for it.” More

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      When ‘A Little Touch of Star Quality’ Is a Little Too Much

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      In upcoming musical revivals, world leaders both real (Imelda Marcos, Eva Perón) and folkloric (King Arthur) get an image makeover they may not deserve.Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes?I don’t mean mere antiheroes like Billy Bigelow, the “Carousel” carnival barker who sings gloriously about love yet hits his wife. Or Joey Evans, that lowlife “pal,” whose bed-hopping grift is set to a sparkling Rodgers and Hart score. Or even Evan Hansen, lying his way to love as he catches your heart with the catch in his throat.They’re all pikers, their damage largely domestic.Sweeney Todd, the liberally neck-slashing barber, is more like it. Though most of Fleet Street has been minced by the time the curtain falls on the musical named for him, he gets some of Stephen Sondheim’s most gorgeous arias, including the sinuous “My Friends” (crooned to his razors) and the erotic “Pretty Women” (whispered in the ear of the judge he’s about to dispatch). That a penny dreadful character originally meant just to shock and sicken becomes instead a pitiable victim is a testament to the power of music to make bad guys, if not good, compelling.Still, in “Sweeney Todd,” which opens next month in a Broadway revival starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the terror remains local because the barber has no leverage. In three other upcoming musical revivals — “Evita,” “Camelot” and “Here Lies Love” — the damage is done by people with real power. Their harm is political, epochal, even as the songs they sing, encouraging empathy that may not otherwise be earned, invite us to give them a pass.Michael Cerveris, center, as the demon barber of Fleet Street, and Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett, second from left, in a 2005 production of “Sweeney Todd” at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesExploring the humanity in flawed characters was the premise of many Golden Age musicals, which leaves them open to challenge today. “Evita” is an extreme case. Tim Rice’s book and lyrics try to keep the sins of Eva Perón, the second wife of the Argentine strongman Juan, at an ironic remove, lest the show seem to endorse her fascist tendencies and demagogic élan. The words make plain, just shy of celebrating, her manipulative genius.But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music works at cross purposes to that distancing effort. Though famously difficult to sing, the difficulty is exciting; it’s impossible not to be thrilled when a performer nails the treacherous downward arpeggios of “Buenos Aires” or the stratospheric belt of “A New Argentina.” And to the extent new productions mimic the chic of the 1979 Broadway premiere, “Evita” always seems to bank on the same “little touch of star quality” that the real Perón did.Whether that contradiction can be addressed within the confines of the musical as written remains to be seen. Sammi Cannold, whose staging for New York City Center’s 2019 gala provided more context for Perón’s ambition, seems poised to go even further in a production scheduled to run from May 14 through July 16 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. It’s promising that in a TED Talk about “Evita,” Cannold reflects on “the responsibility of the storyteller.”More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.More honored in the breach, that notion is part of what renders many Golden Age musicals so tricky today. Some of their unexamined assumptions — about race and gender and even the primacy of pleasurable song over political impact — have been revised or shot down in the intervening decades.One musical compromised in the process is “Camelot,” a romantic retelling of Arthurian legend that opened on Broadway in 1960. Its book, by Alan Jay Lerner, has always been considered clumsy and overlong; for Bartlett Sher’s Lincoln Center Theater revival, which begins performances on March 9, Aaron Sorkin has rewritten it.Though dialogue in “Camelot” explains why Arthur (Richard Burton in the original 1960 production) orders the execution of Guenevere (Julie Andrews), song makes him sympathetic, our critic writes.Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamyBut the score, with Lerner’s lyrics and Frederick Loewe’s music, was always able to compensate for the book’s shortcomings. Arthur’s utopian dreams were so perfectly captured in the title song that it became an emblem of the Kennedy era. The hauteur of his wife, Guenevere, and the egotism of her lover, Lancelot, were exposed and then exploded in torrents of rapturous balladry that swept away their faults.More recent concerns about the story may be more difficult to dismiss with mere melody. Indeed, melody can aggravate the problem. Though dialogue explains why Arthur behaves as he does — ordering his wife’s execution and destroying his country’s peace — song makes him sympathetic. Especially with a beloved score, the identification between audience and the characters is difficult to sever: We sing the songs in our heads as they sing them aloud.If it took six decades to see why that might be problematic for “Camelot,” just one has sufficed to raise similar questions about “Here Lies Love,” which sets the story of Imelda Marcos to a disco score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. A success at the Public Theater in 2013, it is only now transferring to Broadway, where performances are scheduled to begin on June 17.The intervening years have altered the way we look at historical characters onstage, from Alexander Hamilton to Princess Diana. Marcos presents a particular problem, because she’s not yet historical: The country’s first lady from 1965 to 1986, she’s now, at 93, its first mother. (Her son, Ferdinand Jr., known as Bongbong, became president last June.) Whether merely supporting her husband’s dictatorship or more directly influencing and maintaining it, she was part of a regime accused of looting billions from the country’s treasury and eliminating its opponents.In telling the story of Imelda Marcos, a former first lady of the Philippines whose husband’s regime was accused of corruption, “Here Lies Love” takes lyrics from her own speeches and interviews.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNo wonder some Filipinos and Filipino Americans have objected to the way “Here Lies Love,” at least in the version seen at the Public, seems to sympathize with its main character. Sara Porkalob, who recently appeared on Broadway in “1776,” described the musical as painting “a glossy veneer over the Philippines’ national trauma and America’s role in it.”The show’s producers countered that “Here Lies Love” is “an Anti-Marcos show” that aims to fight disinformation with “a creative way of re-information.”But creative to what end? Though most of the show’s lyrics are taken from Marcos’s own speeches and interviews, phrases like “Why don’t you love me?” and “Is it a sin to care?” have a very different effect when merely spoken than when set to singalong melodies and danceable beats. Staging the production in what amounts to a discothèque further complicates the point of view. When song and dance bring so much pleasure, you may miss the atrocities as you’re doing the hustle.Perhaps that’s the point. As the musical has matured, artists have naturally sought to write about people who are more complicated than randy teenagers and frivolous socialites. Yet by applying the powerful tools of the form to darker and more dangerous figures, those figures are literally given greater voice, forcing us to consider the ways in which they are humans even if they may also be monsters.Does that mean whitewashing them? Obviously not; to describe domestic violence, as “Carousel” does, is not to endorse it. And yet seducing us into a kind of emotional complicity with powerful figures, especially real ones like Perón and Marcos, does have its dangers — dangers enhanced by the fundamental amorality of song, no matter what the words say.So when Evita, thrilling her public with diamonds and Dior, sings, “They must have excitement, and so must I,” it’s not that we risk forgiving her. It’s that we risk enjoying too much what we can’t forgive. More

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      The Museum of Broadway Is Open. Here Are 10 Highlights.

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      In Times Square, a 26,000-square-foot space details the history of theater with objects like Patti LuPone’s “Evita” wig, a Jets jacket from “West Side Story” and more.When a Broadway show closes, the next stop for the hundreds of costumes, setpieces and props is often … the dumpster.“The producers often stop paying rent in a storage unit somewhere, which is heartbreaking,” said Julie Boardman, one of the founders of the Museum of Broadway, which opened in Times Square this month.Boardman, 40, a Broadway producer whose shows include “Funny Girl” and “Company,” and Diane Nicoletti, the founder of a marketing agency, are looking to reroute those items to their museum, a dream five years in the making.“We see it as an experiential, interactive museum that tells the story of Broadway through costumes, props and artifacts,” Nicoletti, 40, said of the four-floor, 26,000-square-foot space on West 45th Street, next to the Lyceum Theater.The museum was a self-funded project at the start, Nicoletti said, as they drew from Boardman’s connections to secure meetings with major players in the New York theater industry, including theater owners; the heads of the American Theater Wing, the Broadway League, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS; and executives from the licensing companies. (Boardman and Nicoletti declined to share the for-profit institution’s budget and early investors. Tickets cost $39 to $49, with a portion of each ticket benefiting the nonprofit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS.)The museum occupies a building next to the Lyceum Theater on West 45th Street.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOriginally scheduled to open in 2020, the museum was delayed by the pandemic — though that gave Boardman and Nicoletti more time to acquire artifacts, photographs and costumes. A majority of the more than 1,000 objects and photographs on display are loans from individual artists, creators and producers, as well as performing arts organizations like Disney Theatrical Productions and the Public Theater.The space is organized chronologically, starting with Broadway’s beginnings in the mid-18th century and running to productions onstage now. And more than 500 shows are highlighted here in the form of items like a pair of tap shoes from the current revival of “The Music Man” and the arm cast that the actor Sam Primack wore onstage in September during the final Broadway performance of “Dear Evan Hansen.” Several of the rooms were dreamed up by the same set designers who worked on the shows the spaces are devoted to, among them Paul Clay (“Rent”) and Bunny Christie, who designed the recent revival of “Company.”Nicoletti and Boardman said they also wanted to reveal how shows are made, and highlight the roles of costumers, press agents and stage managers. To that end, a first-floor space, by the set designer David Rockwell, takes visitors behind the scenes of the making of a Broadway show.“People don’t realize shows take five, seven, 10 years to put together,” Boardman said.In addition to rotating the items on display in the permanent areas, Boardman said, the museum plans to host two or three special exhibitions each year in a first-floor space that is now devoted to the drawings of the theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.And as notable Broadway productions end their runs, well, they’ll be ready.“We already have a glove from ‘MJ,’” Boardman said. “And we’re getting a ‘Strange Loop’ usher hat.”Here are 10 highlights from the collection.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesBroadway AIDS QuiltThis quilt, meant to mourn those lost to AIDS and show solidarity with those living with it, was one of the first projects initiated by the organizations Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS. Shows running on Broadway in the late 1980s created handcrafted 7-inch-by-7-inch squares, with much of the work handled by the productions’ wardrobe teams. (Look for the square for the 1984 Terrence McNally musical “The Rink,” which is signed by Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, who won a Tony Award for her role the show.)Patti LuPone ‘Evita’ WigYou aren’t likely to see a Museum of Broadway Wigs anytime soon. That’s because wigs are expensive, and they’re often reused, dyed or cut for new productions, said Michael McDonald, a costumes and props curator for the museum. But this one, created for LuPone by the celebrated wigmaker Paul Huntley for the original 1979 Broadway production of “Evita” — and possibly worn on the production’s opening night — was a gift to her. Each of the approximately 100,000 strands was fitted through a minuscule hole, one by one, to create an accurate hairline, resulting in a seamless look. “It’s hard to believe there’s bobby pins, a cap and a full head of her own hair under the wig,” McDonald said as he pointed to a photograph of LuPone wearing it.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York Times‘West Side Story’ JacketThis Jets jacket, worn by the actor Don Grilley, who succeeded Larry Kert, who played Tony in the original 1957 Broadway company of “West Side Story,” hung in a closet for decades. It was given to the museum by Grilley’s widow, Lesley Stewart Grilley. (Don Grilley died in 2017.) “We got lucky,” McDonald said. “There aren’t many costumes still around from the original.”‘Hair’ Military JacketClearly built to last, this red-and-green military jacket was worn by an ensemble member in the original 1968 production of “Hair,” the 2008 Public Theater revival in Central Park, the 2009 Broadway revival and that production’s 2010 transfer to London. But it most likely dates back even further, said McDonald, who received a Tony nomination for designing the costumes for the Broadway revival and loaned the jacket to the museum. “It was likely used in a production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ at the Public in the 1960s,” he said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesLittle Red Dress From ‘Annie’The iconic fiery red frock from the 1977 Broadway musical about a little orphan with curly red hair whose pluck and positivity wins the heart of the billionaire Oliver Warbucks (not to mention the audience) is on loan from the Connecticut nonprofit Goodspeed Musicals. (“Annie” originated at Goodspeed Opera House in 1976.) “It’s honestly the most instantly recognizable costume on earth,” said Lisa Zinni, a costumes and props curator for the museum.Meryl Streep’s Broadway Debut CostumeLuke McDonough, the longtime costumes director at the Public Theater, had the foresight to hold on to this one: a floor-length, off-white lacy number worn by a then-little-known actress named Meryl Streep, who made her Broadway debut in the Public’s production of “Trelawny of the ‘Wells’” at Lincoln Center in 1975. (One of her co-stars was another fresh face making his Broadway debut: Mandy Patinkin.)Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Phantom of the Opera’ Chandelier InstallationEach of the 13,917 glistening crystals in this piece, which were fashioned by the German artist Ulli Böhmelmann into hanging strands, is meant to represent one performance the Broadway production of “The Phantom of the Opera” will have played from its opening on Jan. 26, 1988, through its closing night performance. Though the final show was originally set for Feb. 18, 2023, the production announced Tuesday that it had been pushed to April 16 amid strong ticket sales (Böhmelmann plans to add the necessary crystals). ‘Avenue Q’ PuppetsIn the early days of the 2003 Broadway production of the puppet-filled musical comedy “Avenue Q,” the show’s low budget meant the puppeteers had to put their charges through quick changes. The show initially had only three Princeton puppets — but he had eight costumes — meaning the puppets took a beating from changing clothes multiple times eight shows a week. “Eventually, they had a puppet for every costume,” McDonald said.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAl Hirschfeld Foundation; Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGershwin Theater Set ModelThis scale model, which is just over five feet wide, was designed by Edward Pierce, the associate scenic designer of the original Broadway production of “Wicked,” and took four people seven weeks to build. It includes more than 300 individual characters — and another 300 seated audience members in the auditorium. (See if you can find the Easter egg: a small model of the set model, with the designers — who look like the actual designers — showing the director a future design for “Wicked.”)Al Hirschfeld Etching of Barbra StreisandThe theater caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, who was most famous for his sketches that ran in The New York Times the Sunday before a show opened, created around 10,000 drawings over his 82-year career. But one of his most popular pieces was his 1968 portrait of Barbra Streisand — captured here in a 1975 etching — which he drew on the Sunday before “Funny Girl” opened in March 1964. It depicts Streisand looking into a mirror showing a 1910 photo of Fanny Brice, whom she played in the Jule Styne musical. “For him, a caption was a toe-curling admission of failure,” said David Leopold, the Al Hirschfeld Foundation creative director who curated the special exhibition. “He wanted the drawing to stand on its own two feet.” More

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      Patti LuPone on 'Company,' Stephen Sondheim and More

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      Her friends say there is nothing more fun than hanging with Patti LuPone while she’s having a glass of wine.That’s not true. There is something more fun: sharing a whole emerald bottle of Perrier-Jouet and dishing with Patti LuPone.Feuds! Lovers! Temper tantrums! Dictatorial directors! Wrongs avenged! Madonna’s “dead” eyes! Andrew Lloyd Webber’s perfidy! And, of course, teary memories of Stephen Sondheim.Last month, Mr. Sondheim, 91, died suddenly at home in Roxbury, Conn., just as he was about to come to New York to be celebrated at the openings of highly anticipated makeovers of two of his milestone collaborations: “West Side Story,” a movie directed by Steven Spielberg, and “Company,” the acidic musical about a terminally ambivalent Manhattan singleton. On Wednesday night, the Broadway lights were dimmed for the composer.Two years ago, when the pandemic shut down Broadway during previews for “Company,” Ms. LuPone retreated to her basement in Connecticut, where she posted videos that went viral showing off her pinball machine, her jukebox, her Ethel Merman cassettes, her husband’s bong and her dance moves to “Hava Nagila.”Now she’s back, picking up where she left off playing Joanne, the jaded, older friend of the singleton. When Ms. LuPone played the role in London before the pandemic, critics gushed and she won an Olivier. In this production, Bobby morphs into Bobbie, a woman whose friends want her to settle down, even though they concede marriage is a mixed bag.As one of Bobbie’s pals sings in the high-velocity “Getting Married Today”: “What’s a wedding? It’s a prehistoric ritual/ Where everybody promises fidelity forever/ Which is maybe the most horrifying word I ever heard of.”Bobbie is played by the lissome Katrina Lenk, who won a Tony in 2018 for her mesmerizing performance as Dina in “The Band’s Visit.”“I think it’s more poignant to have a woman,” Ms. LuPone said, “because we get asked that question, ‘When are you going to get married? The clock is ticking. Eggs are getting old.’ Boys don’t get asked that question, especially when they’re 35, boinking beautiful women.”Who better to mark this Broadway phoenix moment with than Ms. LuPone, the Long Island native who has been called “the goddess of the modern musical” by The Guardian? She is that very particular kind of animal, perhaps the last of the breed, a genuine Golden Age Broadway star, the kind that can turn a theater into a living room, throwing out an electric current that makes 1,000 people feel as if they are being spoken to, and sung to, individually.As Joanne, Ms. LuPone raises a martini glass in her socko “Ladies Who Lunch” number, with its famed primal scream — “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh, I’ll drink to that!”(Mr. Sondheim instructed the singer, who gets passionate about Republican political moves, to unleash her scream by thinking of how she feels when she reads a newspaper.)Patti LuPone as Joanne in the musical “Company.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe role of the salty, hard-drinking Joanne was originated in 1970 by the salty, hard-drinking Elaine Stritch, a Sondheim pal. As Alexandra Jacobs, a book critic for The New York Times, wrote in her biography of the actress, “Still Here,” Ms. Stritch always had her flask of Hennessy backstage when she was playing Joanne, the sort of wealthy Upper East Side woman who might drink vodka stingers and carry a bichon in her Birkin.Ms. Jacobs wrote in The Times that while “Company” is not as well known as other Sondheim shows, it has acquired a cult status among Gen Xers and millennials, who appreciate the fact that it is “drier than a sauvignon blanc, more New York than the Yankees.”Onstage, Ms. LuPone drinks water in her martini glass. But real bubbly is required to toast the lights returning to Broadway.Remembering SondheimAfter a preview performance the other night, we met up and looked for a Times Square bar, but it’s hard now to find one that stays open after shows, or one at all, really. (“Company” opened Dec. 9 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, and Jesse Green, a Times theater critic, called Ms. LuPone’s performance “perfectly etched,” in an otherwise mixed review.)“McHale’s, Charlie’s, Sam’s, Barrymore’s,” Ms. LuPone said, reeling off the names of bars that have closed.So we ended up setting up our own bar — complete with votive candles and vintage coupes — in a room at the Civilian on 48th Street. The small hotel is decorated as a homage to Broadway, with costumes and pictures from shows, so naturally we found a photo of Ms. LuPone that happened to be on the wall of our ersatz bar, a shot of her as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd,” co-written by Mr. Sondheim..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}I asked her if there was anyone she’d like to make into a meat pie, and she shot back, “Do you have to eat it?”In her dressing room, Ms. LuPone keeps a typewritten note sent to her before the pandemic hit by Mr. Sondheim, who was clearly growing more sentimental: “Every now and then I’m brought up short by realizing what a wonderful singer you are. That’s apart from the acting and performing and the attention to detail. In any event, I just felt I had to put it in print. Thank you for enhanceing [sic] my shows — and everyone else’s for that matter, Love, Steve.”Ms. LuPone choked up talking about it. “I just was so flummoxed by it,” she said, still referring to the composer in the present tense. “Steve doesn’t give compliments. I beg your pardon. Steve does give compliments, but they’re hard-earned. His notes can be devastating, which I’ve had several of.”She got a bad note when she was playing Fosca in “Passion” at Lincoln Center; Mr. Sondheim berated her about her enunciation, saying all he heard was “monotonous mush.”“I said in my head, ‘If it was anyone with less experience than me, they would have turned in their equity card,’” she said. “It was a dress down that — I was lost. That’s been my big downfall. I’m a flannel mouth. John Houseman called me a flannel mouth when I was in school.”A Sondheim score “is not easy to sing accurately. It’s a challenge to interpret the lyrics as he intended them with depth,” she said with understatement. “That is a big accomplishment. Steve makes me better. I keep saying, ‘Who will make me better now that Steve is gone?’”Some who worked with Mr. Sondheim thought that he was harder on Ms. Stritch and other women than on men, perhaps because of his dreadful relationship with his mother. He told Meryle Secrest, who wrote his biography, that after his father left for a younger woman, his mother was sexually inappropriate with him: “What she did for five years was treat me like dirt, but come on to me at the same time.” After that, Ms. Secrest said, Mr. Sondheim strived to maintain “a safe psychic distance” from women making overtures, “imagined or real.” (His domineering mother surely shaped his portrait of Rose in “Gypsy.”)“He’s not hard on people that don’t threaten him,” Ms. LuPone said. “I think he was hard on me because — I don’t know. I can’t answer for him but he was hard on me. I’ve got stuff in my scrapbook, the mean stuff and good stuff.” She saves everything, even the hate mail she got after she said she would refuse to perform if Donald Trump came to a show.The petite Ms. LuPone is routinely referred to as a towering legend, but in person she’s earthy, calling everyone from stagehands to fellow cast members to me “doll.”“She’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad,” Ryan Murphy said. “She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesOne of the numbers in “Company” is “Being Alive,” and no one is more alive than Ms. LuPone, 72, who cherishes her fiery Sicilian temperament and her ability, as the writer Karen Heller put it, to “nurse a grudge like cognac.” But it’s easy to see the vulnerability threaded through the bravado.She has her own vocabulary on Broadway: Her rhapsodic fans are called “LuPonettes” and when she publicly burns someone — from an arrogant composer, to a Hollywood star who descends on Broadway for a guest turn, to a littering or photo-snapping or texting audience member — it’s called being “LuPoned.”When she does online forums with fans, she elicits comments like this one: “I wish Patti LuPone was my terrifying but beloved aunt.”Ryan Murphy cast her in roles in “Glee” (causing his young cast members to go “gaga,” he said), “American Horror Story” and his “Hollywood” limited series.“Patti has this insane, volcanic power within her body to sing like that,” Mr. Murphy said. “She is, to the American musical theater scene, what Meryl Streep became to the film world. There will never, ever, ever be another person like Patti LuPone who has that power.“Some might think of her as a diva, but she’s really warm hearted and bawdy and thinks of herself as a broad. She says what’s on her mind. And she knows where all the bodies are buried.”Her friend Joe Mantello, the acclaimed Broadway director and actor who worked with her in “Hollywood,” talked about her duality: “She understands that she’s a great star, she’s a legend. But there’s a part of her that also sees herself as part of Juilliard Group One, a working actress,” he said, referring to the first drama class at the school.After “War Paint,” the 2017 musical in which she played Helena Rubinstein, Ms. LuPone swore she would never do another musical.“I have two new hips and one new shoulder,” she told me. “Musicals are killers. They were breaking my body.”But when she was offered the chance to do “Company” with the British director Marianne Elliott, who directed the Tony Award-winning 2018 Broadway revival of “Angels in America,” Ms. LuPone could not resist.The singer is still afraid of Covid, and she had crying jags about returning to Broadway because “I just don’t want to do musicals anymore.” But she’s back belting, her mezzo-soprano voice still thrilling 41 years after she won her first Tony as Eva Perón in “Evita.” (She won a second Tony playing Rose in Mr. Sondheim’s “Gypsy” in 2008.)And, despite the hip surgeries, she’s back dancing — in heels, no less.“Did you see I tripped tonight?” she asked, adding merrily: “The next musical is in a wheelchair.”I told her that her voice — what she calls “two tiny muscles” and what Mandy Patinkin calls “the two tiny rubber bands in your throat” — sounded amazing.“I made a pact with the devil because, believe me, I’ve abused it,” she said. “In my entire life, I smoked, I took drugs, I blew out vocal cords. I had the vocal cord operation. It’s shocking to me that I still have a voice. I feel like Ethel Merman.”At the preview, the audience was primed to see their Patti again. They got excited before the show started, merely listening to a recording of her voice ominously warning everyone to turn off their phones. (Ms. LuPone famously snatched a phone from an audience member during a 2015 performance at Lincoln Center, after the woman would not stop texting.)“Musicals are treacherous animals,” Ms. LuPone said, talking about all the backstage drama and sniping. “Hits can go south faster than flops. In hits, people become entitled. In flops, you’re holding on for dear life.”Ms. LuPone and Stephen Sondheim at a rehearsal for “Sweeney Todd.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘A Burden and a Blessing’She said that this final act of her career is a lot easier than clambering up to Broadway.“I went through emotional abuse because it was the thing to do to get a performance out of somebody,” she recalled. “I never had the casting couch. They said, ‘Get out!’ They never said ‘Come in.’ I never went through any kind of sexual harassment. No, it was mental and emotional harassment.”She has said that she could be her own worst enemy, letting her temper fly.It would happen in taxicabs, she said. If she thought drivers were cheating on the meter, she would do battle, jump out without paying and yell a raunchier version of “Don’t ever mess with a New Yorker!”Mr. Patinkin, who played Che to her Evita, backed up her tales of pugilistic prowess.When they were on the road doing a concert tour, she once came in with a black eye. She explained that a guy in the parking lot had stolen her space; she had “mouthed off,” and he smacked her.“But you should have seen what I did to him!” she kvelled to Mr. Patinkin.“She doesn’t pull any punches,” he said. “She gives it to you right on the chin.” It doesn’t sound like a metaphor.“I’ve gotten in trouble since I was a toddler for questioning,” Ms. LuPone said. “I got in a lot of trouble in school. When I got out of Juilliard and got into the professional world, there was some weird behavior. Mean stage managers, lousy agents that didn’t protect me. I was completely alone in ‘Evita,’ I had to fight the battles myself.”She has talked about Hal Prince, the director, bullying her, as other British members of the cast tried to prod her to do the part as it had been done in London by Elaine Paige, to which she replied: “Shut up.”“It was like a battlefield from my dressing room past the stage management to the stage,” she said. “It was Beirut. I was safe onstage and I wasn’t even safe on the stage because I couldn’t sing it, so I was in fear every minute.”Ms. LuPone may have felt as if she was in a war zone, but her co-star felt as if he was in heaven.“You’ll never find a better partner to be with onstage, she’s just absolute magic,” Mr. Patinkin said. “I’ve never felt safer with anyone. She could throw a dagger right between my eyes and I know it would stop one millisecond right before it hit my forehead.”“If you feel a little tired or worn out, if something has happened to you,” he added, “she’ll pick you up and make sure you’re alive.“Patti is so sensitive, she sings like a child, very truthfully. She can’t let certain feelings go, which is a burden and a blessing. She fights through it all and gives everything, until there’s nothing left in her.”As she sipped champagne and nibbled on prosciutto, Ms. LuPone looked like she had plenty more in her.“I have scars,” she mused. “And why are we called ‘bitches’ or ‘difficult to work with’ when we’re simply asking for what we need?” It infuriates her, she said, because it is men who are using those labels.“Apparently, I was persona non grata in California after ‘Evita,’ because everybody heard I was difficult in New York. It’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you want to know why I was difficult?’ No, it’s just, ‘You were difficult so you’re on the Life’s Too Short list.’ I’m saying this for every woman and guy that goes through that. Your talent will out. Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”In the wake of #MeToo, she noted, abusive bosses get the hook.“There’s no more bad guys left in the world,” she said with a sly smile. But her black humor is still intact, so she added that, for her show, “We had to go through two days of sensitivity training. I wanted to kill myself.”She played Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” in London, before it came to Broadway. In 1994, when Andrew Lloyd Webber fired her and replaced her with Glenn Close, she wrote in her memoir, “I took batting practice in my dressing room with a floor lamp. I swung at everything in sight — mirrors, wig stands, makeup, wardrobe, furniture, everything. Then I heaved the lamp out the second-floor window.”She sued him and used the $1 million she won to build a pool at her Connecticut house, now christened the Andrew Lloyd Webber Memorial Pool.“The only thing we didn’t do is the police drawing on the bottom of the pool,” she said, laughing.After decades of trading insults, she says simply that Mr. Lloyd Webber is “a sad sack.” Her irritation at Ms. Close still simmers. And then there’s Madonna: In 2017, she told Andy Cohen: “Madonna is a movie killer. She’s dead behind the eyes. She can’t act her way out of a paper bag.” She added, for good measure: “She should not be on film or stage.”When we left the theater, Ms. LuPone said we were exiting through “the Madonna door,” called that because when Madonna acted there in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” in 1988, she made a quick getaway by this door to try to avoid the throngs outside.“That’s when she had that body, in that period when she was staggeringly beautiful,” Ms. LuPone said. “I couldn’t look at anything else but her body. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was just like, ‘Wow.’ She did have presence onstage in that respect, when she came onstage with that body.”I asked Ms. LuPone if it smarts to leave every night by the Madonna door, given that Madonna got the Eva role in the movie.“I always thought that Judy Davis would have been stunning in the movie, and get somebody else to sing it — get Marni Nixon,” she said, referring to the ghost singer for Natalie Wood in “West Side Story” and Audrey Hepburn in “My Fair Lady.”“I want to see somebody that’s going to be electrifying and Madonna is not an electrifying presence on camera,” Ms. LuPone continued. “She’s just not — not for that score, which is insane.“When Mandy and I did it onstage, thank God we had training from Juilliard, so we were able to connect the dots dramatically, because there really wasn’t anything there.”Ouch.I asked about her husband, Matt Johnston, whom she met when he was a cameraman on a 1987 TV movie in which she portrayed the young Lady Bird Johnson. (Mrs. Johnson told her, “Evita was a bird of paradise, and I’m just a little mouse.”) How has the star stayed married for so long in showbiz?“Because Matt gave up show business,” she said. “He became Mr. Mom and a farmer, and he is egoless. He understands what this is that I have to do, and he supports it.” They have a son named Josh, 31, a filmmaker.I was curious about her seven-year romance with Kevin Kline, which got off to a fractious start at Juilliard.“We were at each other in the very beginning,” she said, “and then one day in art history class, we were just all over each other.”And did it really end, as she wrote in her memoir, when Mr. Kline collided with “a chorus girl in Boston while he was doing ‘On the Twentieth Century.’”“Well, it depends on who you ask,” Ms. LuPone said mischievously. “I wanted to move to an apartment that had doors because I was in a tiny little apartment on 21st Street. Kevin thought that was a commitment.”But she still treasures the telegram Mr. Kline sent her on opening night of “Evita”: “InEVITAble!”When I left her outside her New York apartment at 2 a.m., I felt very awake and caught up in the Patti of it all.“Bye, doll,” I called out.“Bye, doll,” she sang back.“Your talent will out,” Ms. LuPone said. “Your talent will carry you, if you stick to it and honor your talent.”Josefina Santos for The New York TimesConfirm or DenyMaureen Dowd: You chided Neil Patrick Harris for not knowing what he was doing in rehearsals for your limited “Company” run at Lincoln Center in 2011.Patti LuPone: True. We had 10 days. He came in and he didn’t know anything.You once played a vengeful ghost who haunted a laundromat and lived in a dryer.Confirm.Your ideal “Ladies Who Lunch” outing would include Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Patti Smith and Bette Davis.Yes.You started your career as a toddler with a Marilyn Monroe imitation.Yes. My mother used to make me come out when I was 3 or 4 and go like this (pursing her lips).You have a long rider attached to every contract that you think of as a scrapbook for every mistake you’ve ever made.Exactly. What’s in the dressing room. What my transportation is. Just to make sure I’m not stressed out when I get there. I learned from Ryan Murphy to ask for “portal to portal.”As Helena Rubinstein said, “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.”I do think that’s true.It was intimidating to sing “Ladies Who Lunch” at Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday party 10 feet away from Elaine Stritch.No, I felt honored. I started singing the line “Does anyone still wear a hat?” and I looked straight at Elaine, who had a hat on, to pay homage. Elaine always said very wise things to me. She was a lovely mentor and a lovely friend.At Juilliard, John Houseman was just as frightening as he was in “The Paper Chase.”He was tough and scary. I got in an elevator with him once in 1969, 1970. I said, “Hi, Mr. Houseman.” He turned to me and said, “Louise Bernikow says you’re the most illiterate person she’s ever met.”You sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” better than the senior George Bush.Can I tell you something about Barbara and George? I did a performance at the East Wing when they were in the White House. And the next time Matt and I went back, we were in the line and I said, “We got pregnant the last time we were here!” At the Willard.By happenstance, you sang at Ryan Murphy’s wedding, which was so private, he didn’t invite any of his friends.I was singing in Provincetown, and I ran into Ryan. So I came to see him come out of his room and sang “Here Comes the Bride” and threw rose petals in his path.You were jealous when Madonna performed in leather and a mesh teddy at the Boom Boom Room during Pride Week.I can’t think of anything funny about Madonna. More