Patti LuPone A Life in Notes
Conceived and directed by Scott Wittman. Written by Jeffrey Richman. Musical direction and arrangements by Joseph Thalken. Brad Phillips on strings. Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Festival Theatre. Adelaide Festival Centre. June 19 2024
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
How does one describe Patti LuPone – legend of the Music Theatre stage.? Doyenne of Broadway? Diva? Icon? In her memoir show, A Life in Notes LuPone is all this and so much more. In two hours of anecdote and song though mainly song she takes the audience through the song cycle of her life and long glittering career.
“The songs I sing tonight are the only ones I can remember” Lupone jokes. A life of high notes, low notes, raw notes and love notes is what she promises. What she delivers is a magical evening in the company of a star of the musical stage. Lu Pone welcomes the audience with Come On-a My House by Ross Bagdasarian and William Saroyan. She introduces us to the songs of teenage angst like Mark Dinning’s Teen Angel through to popular songs from her hippie era with Alfie. With Don’t Cry For Me Argentina from Evita by Andrew Loyd-Webber and Tim Rice Lu Pone captures the power and presence of her performance and the very essence and soul of Evita’s character in musical director Joseph Thalken’s unique arrangements and Brad Phillips’s beautiful accompanying strumming on guitar, These are the incandescent illuminations of an extraordinary life from Arlen to Simone, Porter to Sondheim. These are the songs in the life of a young girl infatuated with Tommy Kirk and Troy Donahue ,a young woman smoking Marijuana in Manhattan, an actor in Chekov;s Three Sisters, a Broadway star and a wife and mother.
A Life in Notes is a songbook of magical moments and phenomenal technique. The audience erupts into applause and cheers as LuPone, resplendently dressed in a shimmering gown raises a martini glass in the air. They know what’s coming. LuPone with a perfect sense of timing launches into Ladies Who Lunch from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. The final notes of Rise Rise Rise!!! ring through the theatre in a sardonic condemnation of false posturing. Goosebumps ripple down the spine at LuPone’s rendition of Rose’s song of longing from Gypsy. These are the songs of Life. There are the songs of the A Bomb anxious Fifties, the Swinging Sixties, the politically shifting Seventies, the AIDS devastated Eighties and into the Nineties to the new millennium and the time conscious pandemic. Time after Time recalls gratefully time to cherish time alone, with family and in reflection. Covid ironically brings LuPone to an epiphany of hope and revitalization with Bob Dylan’s Forever Young. .
With more of life in one’s rear vision mirror, LuPone looks to the past with a rousing rendition of Carol King’s Those Were The Days, yet with her eyes on a future of hope and youthful exuberance where Anything Goes. A Life in Notes is a life of highs and lows, love and raw experience. In an encore it seemed fitting that the audience should clap along to a reprise of Those Were The Days My Friend . We thought they’d never end. It is LuPone’s invitation to us all to “laugh forever and a day”. A Life In Notes is a celebration of life and Patti Lu Pone’s brilliant career
From songs of sombre contemplation (Harold Arlen’s The Man That Got Away) to songs of jubilation (Those were the Days) Lu Pone paints a self-portrait in song that dazzles and delights. A Life In Notes is a lesson in living which brought the Adelaide Cabaret Festival audience to a spontaneous standing ovation. Lupone is currently on a national tour. A Life in Notes is a remarkable memoir in song not to be misse!.
