ALEX GONZALEZ | Contributing Writer
alex.gonzalez38@gmail.com
Over the course of five decades, actor and singer Patti LuPone has transcended the confines of genre. With three Tonys and two Grammys to her credit, Lupone, 76, continues to commemorate significant moments of her life through stage performance and music.
On Saturday, May 24, LuPone brings her A Life In Notes show to the Winspear Opera House.
A Life In Notes , which has taken up the past two years of LuPone’s life, features the multi-hyphenate star performing songs that symbolize defining moments of her life. The setlist comprises of covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Cole Porter, Janis Ian, Eartha Kitt, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and more.
“It’s one thing to sing Broadway songs when maybe, the entire audience is not a Broadway fan,” LuPone tells Dallas Voice, “but I do think the music is essentially about growing up and having music in your life and having several songs that mark a moment — your first boyfriend or girlfriend, the first breakup, the first trip to a big city, the prom, sitting on a beach, watching the moon.
“You know, it’s that kind of stuff. It’s the music that, in my life, a marked moment that could have been a decade, because music has that power.”
This isn’t LuPone’s first rodeo in Texas. Back in 2023, she performed with the Turtle Creek Chorale during the chorale’s annual Rhapsody benefit gala.
“I think what inspires me most about Ms. Lupone is her versatility and commitment to craft,” says Turtle Creek Chorale Artistic Director Sean Baugh. “You don’t see many artists who have a vision and identity and can carry that identity through decades of work. Patti obviously cares a great deal about the craft of musical theater, and she has been unapologetic about that for decades.”
While she’s in town, LuPone said she wants nothing more than to “see a cowboy.” She also looks forward to seeing her several Texas native friends, many of whom she’s kept close for decades.
“Patti is a great guest, a great cook and has a great appetite and curiosity for and about life,” says actor John Benjamin Hickey. “Curiosity is one of the things that keeps you going in this business and keeps you moving forward. Patti loves an adventure.”
When curating the setlist for A Life In Notes , LuPone collaborated with director Scott Wittman and musical director Joseph Falcon. Much of the inspiration came to her as she was filming Marvel’s Agatha All Along, in which she played Lilia Calderu, a witch gifted with the power of divination. Over the course of Agatha All Along, viewers see that Lilia’s gifts manifest via her way of experiencing time — as she can see into the past, present, and the future.
LuPone tapped into this sense of timelessness when connecting the through lines of A Life In Notes .
“I would listen to music from the ’50s, the ’60s, ’the 70s, the ’80s, the ’90s and the 2000s,” says LuPone. “And then I would mark off songs that I wanted to sing — songs that meant something to me. And then we just tried to form a story that chronologically represented my life and how that happened. Jeffrey Richman and I [arranged] it by just recalling episodes in my life.”
Broadway superfans can all recall the moment LuPone changed their lives. Some argue that she was robbed at the 1988 Tony Awards for her performance in Anything Goes, during which she lost to Joanna Gleason for Into The Woods. Others may recall her originating the role of Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard, which premiered on Broadway in 1993.
In between legs of A Life In Notes , LuPone has starred in Scott Brown and Anthony King’s Gutenberg! The Musical! and Jen Silverman’s The Roommate — the 2024 iteration of which featured LuPone performing alongside Mia Farrow.
LuPone’s body of work has proven timeless, and she imagines that a lot of these stories can still continue, especially that of Lilia.
“I did say to [president of Marvel Studios] Kevin Feige, who came to see me in The Roommate, ‘You know what you should do in all of your Marvel movies? Just in the corner of the frame, have Lilia falling.’ I mean, he hopes it’ll continue, but it’s going to depend on the writing and it’s going to depend on the director.
“If somebody wants me in it, I don’t have to play Lilia. I could do anything,” she adds. “But, I mean, I know nothing. I still know nothing about the Marvel world.”
Off set, LuPone has been spending much time in the audience of ongoing plays, including Cole Escola’s Oh Mary — which she’s seen three times — Wittman’s Smash, Hue Park and Will Aronson’s Maybe Happy Ending, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and a revival of Sunset Boulevard starring Nicole Scherzinger.
But as she’s watched the theatrical landscape evolve over the years, LuPone has noticed the same industry issues rear their ugly heads again and again. In a conversation with actor George Clooney for Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series, LuPone told him: “There’s nothing special about us to producers, regardless of what we have achieved in our career on the stage. I’m constantly fighting for my quote.”
Clarifying this comment to Dallas Voice, Lupone stands by what she said, adding that she wants to continue advocating for stage crew and performers.
“Theater is really the poorest arm of the entertainment industry,” LuPone says. “I don’t know why people invest in the theater unless they love it, because you can only have a Hamilton, or A Chorus Line, or a Wicked once in a generation, and you’re more often than not going to lose money.
“You have to invest wisely, and you have to invest knowing that you might lose everything that you’re investing,” she continues. “My general manager said that my rider reads like every mistake in my career, and I said, ‘It is, and it’ll never happen again.’
“It’s a brutal environment, and you have to have a muscle for it.”
Thankfully, LuPone has always been a step ahead of the game. And she displayed this vigilance more than a decade ago during a performance of Shows for Days, in which she starred alongside Dallas native Michael Urie.
“During a climactic scene late in the play between the two of us, I skipped a section of dialogue, and she saved my ass,” Urie says, “And she managed to get the missed information back in. That’s the play [in which she] snatched a cell phone out of an audience member’s hand during [a performance], but that’s another story.”
LuPone has never shied away from wearing her heart on her sleeve. In an April 2023 appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen, she decried Kim Kardashian’s role as a cutthroat publicist on Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story: Delicate, insisting that it should’ve gone to a more seasoned actor: “Excuse me — excuse me, Kim. What are you doing with your life?” Six years prior, she told Variety, that should President Donald Trump show up to a performance of War Paint, she’d refuse to perform, “because I hate the motherfucker.”
She admits that she doesn’t really feel optimistic these days, given the current political climate. “I think the protests [are a good sign], but I don’t know if they give me hope,” LuPone says. “I don’t feel much hope right now.”
But through times of despair and political uncertainty, LuPone finds her bliss on stage, gathering people through the power of song and performance.
“We’ve got to have fun,” says LuPone. “It’s a joy that we get to play. Our work is play.”