Patti LuPone is the reigning queen of the women who punch.
When she’s not scolding audiences for disruptive habits, the 71-year-old Broadway legend — at the moment starring in Ryan Murphy’s “Hollywood” on Netflix — is serving shade to different stars in her orbit.
Whether or not sizing up composer and oft-nemesis Andrew Lloyd Webber as “a jerk” and “a tragic sack” final fall, suggesting Uma Thurman’s 2017 Broadway debut helped “decrease the usual” for theater or declaring Madonna a “film killer” who “can’t act her means out of a paper bag,” she’s all the time able to spill some tea.
The diva of dish doesn’t maintain again — and we’ll drink to that.
In her newest pokes at her friends, the irrepressible LuPone humorously savaged Meryl Streep, Audra McDonald and Christine Baranski for his or her booze-swilling, bathrobe-wearing rendition of Stephen Sondheim’s “The Women Who Lunch” in the course of the digital 90th birthday tribute to the musical theater legend. It’s a tune close to and expensive to LuPone, who was performing the tune in a revival of Sondheim’s “Firm” this spring till the coronavirus pandemic shut down Broadway.
In an interview with LGBTQ publication Between the Strains final week, LuPone mentioned — with a cackle — that their rendition ruined the tune for her, proclaiming that she’ll by no means have the ability to carry out it once more as a result of “they trashed the quantity!”
“I say that with nice humor, however I’m not going to have the ability to sing it with out considering of them doing it,” she mentioned, with fun.
And when requested how she would change the film trade for the higher, she went on to decrease the flurry of well-liked superhero motion pictures which have taken over Hollywood.
“I might greenlight movies and tv exhibits that I believed had been going to be helpful for training and for fogeys, versus, ‘Properly, that was an enormous hit; let’s make 9,000 extra of these Marvel comics,’ ” she mentioned.
‘I hate ABBA. I’ve all the time hated ABBA.’
LuPone additionally wouldn’t approve of a 3rd “Mamma Mia!” movie, throwing explicit venom on the singing group behind the tune that spawned the film franchise and Broadway present.
“I hate ABBA. I’ve all the time hated ABBA,” she mentioned. “I can’t go see “Mamma Mia!” as a result of I hate ABBA. And I’ve hated ABBA since I used to be a child.”
LuPone additionally threw shade on different targets in an look on “Watch What Occurs Reside With Andy Cohen” final week.
LuPone, the 2008 Tony Award winner for Greatest Actress in a Musical in “Gypsy,” instructed Barbra Streisand, 78, could be “too previous” to star in a film adaptation of that present, whereas conceding that she thinks that Streisand “perhaps 50 years in the past she would have been an excellent Madame Rose.” And when requested whether or not Joanna Gleason deserved to win the 1988 Tony Award for Lead Actress in a Musical for “Into the Woods’ over LuPone’s competing flip in “Something Goes,” she dropped an emphatic “No,” then including, “I believed I used to be fairly rattling humorous, and I had rather a lot to do.”
She additionally let the fur fly in regards to the field workplace bomb “Cats,” saying she’ll “by no means” see the movie adaptation of Webber’s musical. She mentioned she already hated it as a stage present and even walked out of the current London revival after the primary act. Her remaining evaluation of “Cats”: LuPone rated it a “zero” on a scale of 1 to 10.
Meow!