The press couldn’t get enough of Broadway’s breakout star mingling with New York’s home team, and rumors spread that LuPone was dating the Rangers’ curly-haired Adonis Ron Duguay. LuPone says they were just acquaintances. (She did date an Edmonton Oiler who broke her heart.) But she remembers berating Duguay when he went to “Evita” and spent part of the show flirting with his agent at the bar. He’s now dating Sarah Palin. “They’re perfect for each other,” LuPone told me. “They’re two of the stupidest human beings on the face of the earth.” Then she paused. “How do you say stupid without saying stupid? He’s a box of bricks.” (“Wow, that’s hurtful,” Duguay said, when I reached him by phone, adding, “I can’t imagine living my life being so hateful that way.”)
One morning, LuPone called me and asked, “What are you doing tomorrow night?” Within minutes, she’d used her hockey connections to get us V.I.P. tickets to see the Rangers play against the Toronto Maple Leafs. “Seven-o’clock puck drop,” she told me in a voice memo. We met at a private dining room high in Madison Square Garden. Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby Bacala on “The Sopranos,” was sitting at the next table and gave LuPone a big hello. (Her brother Bobby, who died in 2022, played Tony Soprano’s neighbor Bruce Cusamano.) She tried to order a sherry—no dice. “Nobody has sherry!” she moaned.
LuPone had brought along Pat White, who became her longtime backstage dresser after the 1987 revival of “Anything Goes.” I remembered White from LuPone’s Tony speech for “Gypsy,” in which she thanked “my very own Thelma Ritter, friend, and wrangler, Pat, who gives me a shot every single night. I don’t know what’s in it, but I’m giving the performance of my life!” (The shot joke was White’s idea.) “The people who have become star dressers know how to anticipate—and how to defuse,” LuPone said, drawing out the “Z” sound. “A lot of things can upset the equilibrium of an actor, and musicals, in my opinion, are by their very nature a vicious beast.”
White, a reserved woman in her sixties with a thick Massachusetts accent, agreed. During “Sweeney Todd,” in 2005, White would read out their horoscopes from the Post while LuPone got made up. One night, LuPone realized that White was reading her the wrong horoscope, and White admitted, “If yours is bad, I just read you the best one out of all of them.”
After dinner, we were escorted to the ice: second row, behind the Toronto bench. “I’m so happy!” LuPone said, giddy, sipping rosé out of a plastic cup through a straw. Her son, Josh, had told her to keep an eye on the Leafs’ No. 34, Auston Matthews. She reapplied her lipstick as the teams skated out. “I’m going to root for whoever wins,” she said.
A tenor who had been on Broadway in “The Phantom of the Opera” came out to sing the anthems. LuPone stood and sang along to “O Canada” but grimaced at “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which she finds too martial and hard to sing. “Good luck with this one, Mister,” she grumbled, declining to join in.
“I predict the Leafs winning,” she said as the game began, citing her “Sicilian witch instinct.” Nilsson had told me that acting and hockey are similar, because both require focus. But LuPone didn’t see much overlap. “It was all sex appeal,” she recalled of her hockey fixation. “It was rare to have anything in common except for the party that we were going to.” Soon she was shouting at the players, “Take your clothes off, boys! Naked hockey! No cups—I want full frontal! HA!”
“They have to wear skates,” White chimed in. “And the helmets.”
LuPone grunted, “Does anyone still wear a hat?”
The Leafs scored, and she cheered. Less so for the Rangers—she’d been turned off by all the U.S.A. jingoism. She also disapproved of the jumbotron (“Don’t tell me how I should feel”) and the fan contests during commercial breaks (“Too much shit going on”). After the first period, with the Leafs ahead 2–1, she retired to a V.I.P. lounge and recalled her “Evita” days. At curtain call, she said, her applause would dip after the ovation for Mandy Patinkin, who played the populist narrator Che. “I had to convince myself it was because I was so good in the part that they couldn’t make up their minds how they felt about me,” she said. “People thought I was a blond bitch, a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer.” To make herself feel better, she started performing a midnight cabaret act on Saturdays after the show, at the Chelsea club Les Mouches. She would cover Petula Clark and Patti Smith and let her wild side run free: “It was a desire for people to see who I really was.”
During the second period of the hockey game, she got restless. “The fighting is so stupid,” she groaned, as two players brawled. “They look like idiots.” The Leafs scored again, and she wiggled two fingers above her head—her Sicilian witch antennae. I asked her if her affinity for the away team echoed her struggle to win over the audience as Evita. “I gravitate toward the unexpected one, I really do,” she said. At the second intermission, with the Leafs up 4–2, the announcer welcomed a couple of excited children who had won rides on the Zambonis. “Who gives a shit?” LuPone bellowed. She had an early flight, so she left.
“Let me know who wins,” she deadpanned.
One evening, LuPone was onstage at Symphony Space, on the Upper West Side, warming up with the piano. She ran through “Fever,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” and “Anything Goes,” but there was a good chance that she wouldn’t perform any of them. The concert, “Songs from a Hat,” was designed like a parlor game: spectators would reach into a top hat and pull out numbered cards, and LuPone would sing the corresponding songs—mostly showstoppers she’d claimed over her career, such as “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” or “The Ladies Who Lunch.”
An hour later, she reappeared in a glittery black dress. The format cast LuPone as a woman up for a dare. “I have no idea what I’m going to sing,” she told the crowd, “and it’s the most fun I have onstage.” A woman in the front row picked No. 5. “Oh, God,” LuPone said. “I did this show on Broadway—for two weeks.” It was “As Long As He Needs Me,” from “Oliver!” She had starred in a failed revival in 1984, her first Broadway show after “Evita.”
Her eighties career had its ups and downs. She left “Evita” after twenty-one months, because “I lost my sense of humor,” she said. She declined an offer to play Lady Macbeth at Lincoln Center—“I said, ‘Haven’t I just been playing her for two years?’ ”—and instead went into “As You Like It” at the Guthrie, in Minneapolis, because she wanted to work with the Romanian director Liviu Ciulei. (During that show’s run, she got kicked out of Prince’s night club after she screamed at some people who were booing her cousin’s punk band.) She played Harrison Ford’s sister in “Witness,” but Hollywood’s interest in her was intermittent. At one point, she starred in a dead-end TV pilot as a singing ghost who haunts a laundromat. Nearly a dozen fizzled plays after “Evita,” she was cast as Fantine in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s première of “Les Misérables,” in London. It was a runaway hit, but she chose not to remain with the show when it went to Broadway, because her experience with the R.S.C. was so perfect that she didn’t want to taint it. “I’ve never known whether I’ve made the right decision,” she told the Symphony Space crowd, when someone picked “I Dreamed a Dream” from the hat.
“I was dealt the hard hand, in everything. So I say, This life is about figuring that out. The next life is going to be easier.”
