On Tonys night, Broadway divided over Patti LuPone’s remarks about Audra McDonald
More than a few years ago now, my mom asked me why the UK’s royal family seemed to be all over the news all the time. That’s all I see when I turn on my computer, she said. I think that might be because you’ve been clicking on some stories about Meghan and Harry, I told her, leading to lots more stories about Meghan and Harry.
Similarly, I’ve lately been treated to many variations on basically the same recycled story about the great offstage Broadway drama featuring Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald. Stop, I cry, though if they weren’t my Meghan and Harry, I wouldn’t keep seeing this stuff.
In case they’re not your Meghan and Harry, here’s the deal: A recent New Yorker profile of LuPone made news, none of it good for her. In the piece, she’s quoted saying disparaging things about two Black actresses, her fellow Tony winners Kecia Lewis and McDonald, Broadway’s most decorated star. Some 700 Broadway performers signed a petition saying LuPone should be disinvited from Sunday night’s Tony Awards for her bullying and racially insensitive remarks.
She then profusely apologized, falling on her own knife like Liù in Puccini’s “Turandot,” and various stage actors have been weighing in on whether or not she should be forgiven.
Unfiltered LuPone
Now, Patti LuPone has always been unfiltered, in that one way like the Donald Trump she’s said she hates; you do not want to be caught with your cell phone ringing when she’s on stage. Only she comes off in this profile as generous and gigantic and human and hurt and self-sabotaging but also finally going too far in letting loose on others, and in general. Is she for real or putting on a show when shouting at New York Rangers, “Take your clothes off, boys! Naked hockey! No cups — I want full frontal! HA!”
She is in let-’em-have-it mode throughout, referring to Glenn Close, the actress who replaced her in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ 100 years ago as a ‘bitch,’ and telling the New Yorker writer Michael Schulman more than once that the now Trump-run Kennedy Center “should get blown up.”
Which, hello, is not in any way OK. Serious or not, and people who say these things always insist that they were not, it’s wrong to complain about Trump’s violent rhetoric and then go around talking like this. So LuPone should also walk those remarks way the heck back. And I do not love to see women tearing down women; are things really not hard enough? Kevin Kline got off easy in the profile; all LuPone said about him is that he was a terrible boyfriend back in the day.
Despite all of the many posts I have read about the explosions that followed the publication of the profile, I would never have understood the genesis of the contretemps without the guidance of New York Times theater reporter Michael Paulson.
He reported on what happened after LuPone complained last year that noise from the Black-led Alicia Keys musical “Hell’s Kitchen” could be heard in the theater next door, where LuPone and Mia Farrow were performing in “The Roommate.” LuPone took her gripe to the Shubert Organization, which runs both theaters. So far, perfectly normal, and something that happens all the time.
Shubert fixed the problem. But then, Paulson wrote, after LuPone sent flowers to the “Hell’s Kitchen” sound crew, she was videotaped describing the musical as “loud,” and refusing to sign a “Hell’s Kitchen” playbill. That’s when Kecia Lewis, who is in “Hell’s Kitchen,” responded with a video calling LuPone’s behavior “racially microaggressive” by reinforcing stereotypes. McDonald weighed in by posting some supportive emojis on the video.
McDonald said she knew of no rift
In the New Yorker interview, LuPone said of Lewis, “Don’t call yourself a vet, bitch.” Which was way over the line. She said McDonald was “not a friend,” and then declared that she needed a nap. Of course she did; setting yourself on fire can be very draining.
McDonald wisely said she didn’t know about any rift between herself and LuPone. Lewis has wisely not made any public statement.
“For as long as I have worked in the theater,” LuPone said in her own statement, “I have spoken my mind and never apologized. That is changing today. … From middle school drama clubs to professional stages, theater has always been about lifting each other up and welcoming those who feel they don’t belong anywhere else. I made a mistake, I take full responsibility for it, and I am committed to making this right.”
Both McDonald and LuPone have given me so much joy, not just over the years but this year, that this is drama I could have done without.
McDonald ripped my heart out and then handed it back to me with her “this-isn’t-your-Momma’s-Momma-Rose” performance in “Gypsy.” I spent a lot more than I could afford to be on the front row with our Aunt Mimi Turque, who was cast by composer Jule Styne to play June in an early national touring company of the show.
LuPone also showed me a wonderful time recently with her show at the Kauffman Center, where she received five standing ovations, one before she sang a note. It’s the only time in my experience — Can you say ‘gay icon’? — that there hasn’t been a line outside a ladies’ room at the Kauffman at intermission, and I went home so energized from her performance, which these days in particular is worth a lot.
So what I want to say is that with everything going on in the world that the arts stand squarely against, energy spent on fury at someone who has groveled from here to Argentina is energy wasted. I still love both of you “Ladies Who Lunch,” the Sondheim anthem to female rage that I’ve seen both of you crush.
I’d like to think that LuPone learned something from this whole episode — though again, those comments about the Kennedy Center still do need clearing up asap.
We could all of us, of course, be less eager to pounce and readier to forgive. The many ageist comments about Patti, who is 76, by those Audra fans who aren’t ready to let this go, and say they never will be, aren’t OK, either. Unfortunately, art doesn’t always bring even the relatively like-minded together. As always, that’s up to us.
UPDATE: I thought McDonald would win her 7th Tony tonight for the same role that LuPone won for in 2008, but no, the award for leading actress in a musical went to Nicole Scherzinger for her Broadway debut in a revival of “Sunset Boulevard.” Pretty sure LuPone would not have wanted to be at the awards show, since it was Glenn Close who introduced Scherzinger singing, “It’s As If We Never Said Goodbye.” And Oprah Winfrey, who presented the award to Scherzinger, made some interesting faces as she made the show’s only veiled reference to the controversy, but she did not mention LuPone by name.
This story was originally published June 8, 2025 at 5:32 PM with the headline "On Tonys night, Broadway divided over Patti LuPone’s remarks about Audra McDonald."
