Lupone, Patti

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PATTI LUPONE

Born: Northport, New York, 21 April 1949

Genre: Vocal

Best-selling album since 1990: Heatwave (1995)

Aleading Broadway stage performer of the 1980s and 1990s, Patti LuPone is a versatile singer whose torchy style encompasses rock, pop, and jazz. Infusing her performances with her larger-than-life personality, LuPone conveys a winning mixture of tartness and vulnerability. Her voice is powerful and wide-ranging, moving effortlessly from a rich bellow to a breathy soprano. A skilled actress, she is adept at shifting the dramatic emphasis within a song, altering the texture of her voice to communicate a breadth of emotional experience.

Descended from Adelina Patti, a popular opera singer of the 1880s, LuPone began performing at the age of four. In 1972 she graduated from the prestigious Juilliard School of Drama in New York, where she gained solid training in drama as well as musical theater. In 1979 LuPone created the role for which she remains best known, that of glamorous Argentine ruler Eva Peron in Evita, a musical written by hit Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. LuPone's charismatic performance, highlighted by her yearning treatment of the song, "Don't Cry for Me Argentina," won Broadway's annual Tony Award in 1980. In 1985 she starred in the original London production of the musical Les Miserables, belting one of the show's stand-out numbers, "I Dreamed a Dream," with heart-rending conviction.

Although she spent the late 1980s and early 1990s acting in the television drama "Life Goes On," LuPone returned to the stage in the London production of Lloyd Webber's musical Sunset Boulevard (1993), based on the classic 1950 film of the same name. Portraying faded movie star Norma Desmond, LuPone found an aching humanity beneath the character's bravado, transforming the show's finest song, "As if We Never Said Goodbye," into a beguiling treatise on the lingering power of fame. Unfortunately, LuPone's triumph was short-lived: After the show received mostly negative reviews from American critics, Lloyd Webber replaced her with film star Glenn Close for the Broadway opening in 1994. Although recalling that she was "deeply burned" in a 1997 interview with the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph, she rebounded, performing a one-woman show on Broadway in 1995 and appearing in several films. In 1995 she recorded Heatwave, a live album with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

In 1999 LuPone released Matters of the Heart, her first in-studio, as opposed to live, recording. Tackling a diverse array of material, she is alternately sensitive and comedic, contemplative and raucous. On "Shattered Illusions," for example, she details the disappointments of love in boisterous fashion: "But the thing that caused the final rift / Was when his toupee started to drift." Her rendition of "Air That I Breathe," on the other hand, is subtle and direct, bearing a winning simplicity absent from the hit 1974 version by pop group the Hollies. The album's restrained moments, such as the tender "My Son," evince the depth of LuPone's artistic maturation. On the more aggressive numbers, such as a belting treatment of composer Stephen Sondheim's "Not a Day Goes By," she tends to slur the words, her brassy delivery carrying a nasal ring. Nonetheless, even when singing too fervently she succeeds on the strength of her personality. In 2001 LuPone returned to Broadway in a nonmusical role, performing in the farcical play Noises Off.

Patti LuPone's expressive dramatic range and finely honed acting skills contributed to some of the most memorable musical theater portrayals of the 1980s and 1990s. While known for her forcefulness and humor, beginning in the late 1990s she revealed a softer, more introspective side, infusing an eclectic repertoire with subtle intelligence.