Patti LuPone at Les Mouches

Ghostlight Records
Available Nov. 11
While starring in Evita in 1980, Patti LuPone also did cabaret late Saturday nights. This little bundle of energy (as the phrase goes) piled Ossa on Pelion in the wee hours by appearing at Les Mouches, a disco/cabaret whose name translates as the Flies.

Why would a nightspot pick such a seemingly unappetizing moniker? Well, there is a French idiom, une fine mouche, which means, of a man, that he is a card; of a woman, that she is a sly minx. The idea was, I guess, that a French card is even sharper, a French minx even cannier, than their American counterparts.

It is to Patti LuPone’s credit that she could garner the attention of the most raffish audience. Where hooch and palaver could easily hold sway, she could make the show the thing, and do it for 27 consecutive weeks. Now a batch of those midnight performances have unexpectedly seen daylight on some forgotten tapes; from them was extracted the CD Patti LuPone at Les Mouches, 20 tracks covering quite a trajectory.

There are moments when LuPone’s singing turns mannered or overzealous. At times she will explode into a growl or shriek; at others, she forgets that words have meanings as well as sounds. Never mind, though; her great ability is to be all things to all men and women: brash and tender, vulgar and delicate, streetwise and ingenuous. And always very New York: You can hear its sidewalks in her accent.

What does she sing? A bit of everything: from Fats Waller (“Squeeze Me”) to Stephen Sondheim (“Not While I’m Around”), from Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen (“Because the Night”) to Cole Porter (“Love for Sale”), from Bob Dylan (“Mr. Tambourine Man”) to Yip Harburg and Burton Lane (“Look to the Rainbow”), from Stephen Schwartz (“Meadowlark”) to Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (“Come Rain or Come Shine”).

The songs were picked and arranged by her music director and pianist, David Lewis, to whom, as well as to the musicians, she pays ample tribute. She will even effervescently recognize celebrities in her audience—Tovah Feldshuh, Vincent Gardenia and, most glowingly, Sondheim—rather like a charmingly bubbly starstruck schoolgirl.

She has her special way of tossing thank yous to her audience: slightly breathless, a trifle abashed, borderline plangent, occasionally accompanied by a nervous little laugh that can, however, erupt into guffaws. Patti’s patter, of which there is a taste or two here, is mostly childhood reminiscences, somewhat naive and thus endearing. There is a personality there.

The mostly disco arrangements don’t always work for the best, and here and there we get a song I could have gladly done without: Paul Jbara’s “Heaven Is a Disco,” Leiber and Stoller’s “I’ve Got Them Feelin’ Too Good Today Blues” or Al Dubin and Harry Warren’s “Latin from Manhattan,” which is not so much Gotham as Tinseltown.

But there are also—besides the obligatory Gershwin (“I Got Rhythm”) and the then mandatory “Downtown,” orphaned without Petula Clark—pleasant surprises, like the David Lewis and Norman Dolph “Everything I Am” and especially the Norman Gimbel and David Shire “It Goes Like It Goes,” so good that I even forgive that “like” usurping an “as.”

And, as you would expect, there are two songs from Evita, in which she was then triumphing, “Rainbow High” and “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,” wherein no one has ever surpassed her. Also, would you believe that the blowsy belter could turn into a caressing ingénue in “Goodnight Sweetheart”? Well, she can. An old chestnut, of course, like “Street of Dreams,” but, with the agility of one retrieving chestnuts from the fire, Patti pulls them into a pulsating present—1980 or 2008.

With the help of the booklet’s generous essays and photographs, you can picture Patti LuPone in her unisex white tie and tails being, before that motley Les Mouches crowd, raucous and rowdy one instant, down-home and dreamy the next. Truly, the face, the figure, the voice of everyone’s desire.