What Made Patti LuPone Want to Smack Sondheim? The Broadway-Bound Diva Confesses

Patti LuPone has proven her mettle as an interpreter of the music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim in Broadway productions of Gypsy and Sweeney Todd and Ravinia Festival mountings of Passion, A Little Night Music, Anyone Can Whistle and Sunday in the Park With George. She’s serenaded Sondheim at various galas and birthday celebrations. So, what made our favorite diva get a tad peeved at the master after a recent event?

In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, LuPone said of Sondheim, “He’s a task master when it comes to pitch and what is considered Broadway singing—no bending of the note, no swooping. I was in Company this year at the New York Philharmonic—at the after-party, he gave me a note and I wanted to smack him. Well, I didn’t want to smack him. But this was two hours after the production closed.... Basically, [he said] I was slurring two words and that I recovered. It’s his music and his lyrics so of course he’s going to notice.”

Now that LuPone and her close friend Mandy Patinkin are headed to Broadway in An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, they’ll no doubt remember her words of caution when performing a Sondheim duet: “It takes a lot of concentration and discipline to sing him as written,” she told the Times. “When I see musicals in New York today, I usually don’t know if I’m watching American Idol or a Broadway performance. It should be as precise as an operatic aria.”