Vintage LuPone act surfaces in `Les Mouches' recording

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November 11, 7:59 AM

by Chad Jones, S.F. Theater Examiner

 

 

Recorded 28 years ago, Patti LuPone's cabaret act
at New York's Les Mouches nightclub finally makes
it onto CD courtesy of Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom records.

That’s exactly how the now-legendary cabaret show “Patti LuPone at Les Mouches” came to be. LuPone, then 31, was starring as Eva Peron in the massive Broadway hit “Evita,” and every Saturday night after completing a week in what LuPone calls “the hardest role of my career to date,” and then heading from the Broadway Theatre to the Chelsea nightclub Les Mouches, where LuPone would perform in a 500-seat cabaret space above a discotheque.

So why did she subject herself to such a grueling post-show show?

Because during the “Evita” curtain call, Mandy Patinkin, who was playing Che, would bow to rousing applause, then LuPone would come out for the final bow, still in the hospital dress Eva Peron wears in her last scene. And the applause would dip.

“I was sure the applause dipped because I had done such a good job and they can’t make up their mind about me,” LuPone, 59, says in a recent phone interview. “It was debilitating to have the applause dip if you’re the leading lady getting the final bow.”

So, to prove to audiences that she was a “brown-eyed, brown-haired comedienne and not a blonde, fascist tap dancer,” LuPone forced herself, through sheer will, she says, to go perform an energetic, eccentric cabaret show every Saturday night for 27 weeks.

Those shows, which became legendary in their own time and attracted all kinds of attention and kudos, were recorded by the sound guy on cassette tapes. Those tapes, consequently, were put in boxes and mostly forgotten.

Now, largely thanks to an ambitious, wildly talented Broadway performer named Leslie Kritzer, “Patti LuPone at Les Mouches” has been rescued from obscurity, and those old sound-booth tapes have been lovingly (not to mention digitally) restored by Joel Moss and Charlie Eble and released on CD by Ghostlight/Sh-K-Boom records.

Kritzer, best known for roles in “Legally Blonde” (which began its life in San Francisco) and “The Great American Trailer Park Musical,” knew a good thing when she heard one of those old “Les Mouches” tapes. She painstakingly reconstructed the LuPone show and even got David Lewis, LuPone’s original musical director and the man who devised the entire act, to work with her and resume his pianist duties.

The New York Times said of Kritzer’s show, “her vocal intonations are eerily precise and very funny,” and other critics echoed the praise and pointed out that Kritzer’s performance was less a send-up of LuPone at her kookiest than it was an expertly performed tribute.

LuPone never saw Kritzer perform. “I’m not dead yet,” she says. “I’m not gonna sit in a chair and watch me on stage.”
Plans for Kritzer to record her show were scotched when LuPone moved forward with plans to release her own version of the original, cleaned-up tapes.

Listening to herself on those manic Saturday nights, LuPone is clearly delighted.

“Everyone was on speed!” she says in her ebullient way. “It’s so fast. I listened to those opening bars and though the tape must have gotten screwed up, but no! Everybody’s on speed! I don’t know if that was the case or not, but it sounds like it.”

Patti LuPone won her second best
actress Tony Award for her perfor-
mance as Rose in the still-running
revival of "Gypsy." Photo by Joan
Marcus

The eclectic set list that Lewis devised makes the head spin. There are typical cabaret tunes – Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale,” Harburg and Lane’s “Look to the Rainbow” and the Gershwins’ “I Got Rhythm” – alongside contemporary tunes such as Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night,” Bob Dylan’s “Tambourine Man” and the Oscar-winning theme song from “Norma Rae,” “It Goes Like It Goes.” There’s even some disco (“Heaven Is a Disco”) and a surprisingly affecting take on the old Petula Clark chestnut “Downtown.”

LuPone also pays homage to her Broadway roots with songs from her shows “The Baker’s Wife” (“Meadowlark”) and “Evita” (“Rainbow High,” “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”). She gushes over Stephen Sondheim’s presence in the audience and says she really, really wants to be in one of his shows. She sings “Not While I’m Around” from “Sweeney Todd,” which just happens to be a show she ended up in on Broadway 20-some years later.

Chatty and giggly, LuPone is a riot.

Listening to her unbridled younger self, the present-day LuPone would offer the young performer this advice: “Calm down! I can’t believe how many times I went `thankyouthankyouthankyou.’ But it was pure, unadulterated joy. There’s not a lot of artifice there. I went out there, people showed up. A lot of whooooppeee going on. I don’t regret any of it. You can edit to the point of turning into a bore as a performer or just let it be.”

During the run at Les Mouches, LuPone was nominated for a Tony, and when her awards gown went terribly wrong, she ended up wearing her Les Mouches tuxedo when she went up on stage to accept the award for best actress.

“I don’t know what happened, but the dress was disastrous,” LuPone says. “I wore the Les Mouches tux, which I had sweated in the night before. I hadn’t been cleaned in a while, so it was a little rank. My friend Jeffrey gave me the roses in the lapel. There was nobody for hair and makeup, and that’s how I went to the Tonys.”

LuPone, who earned her second best actress Tony earlier this year for her role in “Gypsy,” which she is still performing eight times a week (and will be through March 1), says she had nothing to do with the Les Mouches song choices. That was all Lewis, into whose hands she put herself entirely.

Calling herself a “rock ‘n’ roll wannabe,” LuPone says if she were going to do a Les Mouches-like show today, she’d probably go back to her own rock favorites: the Eagles, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell and The Band. LuPone jokes that her husband, Matt, wants to put an act together for his wife called “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man,” and the second act would open with – what else? – the “Theme from `Shaft’.”

For more with Patti LuPone about her stint in “Gypsy,” visit my TheaterDogs.net blog here.

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