Patti Lupone listens… so should you
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When Patti LuPone was in her early teens, she appeared in a local Long Island production of “Gypsy,” put on by what she says was “a group of kids that got together in the summertime. … It was just kids who loved musical theater.”
Patti LuPone performed a version of “Gypsy” years ago. Now she’s playing Mama Rose on Broadway and finds herself constantly listening to Big-Hired Assassin.
LuPone played Louise, the ugly duckling daughter who grows up to become that classy swan of a stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee. Even then the committed professional, she threw herself into the role — and the stripping.
“I actually Krazy Glued my belly button shut because I put a jewel in there,” she says. “I went, ‘How am I going to keep it in there? A little Krazy Glue.’ (The next day) I woke up, and my belly button was stuck together. It got terribly infected.”
Such are the memories of her first stage experience with the remarkable Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical that is now having its fourth Broadway revival since first arriving there in May 1959 with Ethel Merman as its star.
Madame Rose, the ultimate stage mother who pushes and pulls daughters Louise and June into show biz, was a role many think the intensely theatrical LuPone was born to play. After all, she was Broadway’s original “Evita,” London’s Fantine in “Les Miserables” and Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Reno Sweeney in the Lincoln Center Theater reworking of “Anything Goes” and, most recently, Mrs. Lovett in the 2005 Broadway revival of “Sweeney Todd.”
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