by Patti Lupone
After the show, Richard Allen, my hairdresser, and Sal Mistretta, a member of the company, took me out to calm me down. I normally never went out after the show because of my voice. They took me to North Beach, the Italian neighborhood. I got drunk and threw up red (tomato sauce) on a pink Cadillac.
It became even crazier when I arrived at the Pacific Heights Victorian mansion that had been rented for me, sight unseen. I didn’t actually live there; I just slept there and woke up there. The house may have been gorgeous, but it was infested with mice. To deal with the problem, the owner had put rat poison behind a dresser in my bedroom. Here I was, alone in this mansion, and as soon as the lights went out and I tried to sleep, the mice jumped into the rat poison. If that dresser hadn’t been so heavy, I would’ve moved it and jumped in with them. It’s a test, I told myself. All of this is a test.
One night I came back after the show and looked down the hallway into the kitchen. I saw a mouse sitting up in the middle of the kitchen floor. I walked by it and said, “Hello. I know you, my little friend.” Then I got on the phone with David Schramm, my classmate from Juilliard. We talked for about forty-five minutes, and all that time the mouse didn’t move.
When I hung up the phone, I realized that the mouse was dying. I got down on my hands and knees to face the critter. I explained, “I didn’t put the rat poison down. This isn’t my house.” And with that, the mouse sort of reared up with one paw, as if to say, You killed me.
Here I was on all fours, in a staring contest with a mouse. Nothing can be more absurd, I realized. It was the staring contest that actually lifted the black cloud over my head. Fuck it, I thought. I’m going to get through this because on top of everything else, I’m conversing with a mouse. Bing. That was it.
I was still working daily with David Vosburgh. We’d have a voice lesson during the day, and then in the performance I’d try to apply what I’d learned. It was extremely difficult. I’d get the head of the horse right, and the tail would fall off. I’d get the head and the tail, and a leg would fall off. It just never gelled. But at least I was working on it and David was helping me break down the score and develop a vocal technique so that I’d be able to sing it … eventually.
Through it all Mandy Patinkin was my ballast, my savior. Whenever I was onstage with him, not only was there great respect and love crossing the boards from one actor to another, one friend to another, he also saved my ass. Whenever he saw that I was tied in a knot, he took me by the shoulders. He said some sage things and kept me onstage. For that I will be forever grateful to him. Beyond grateful. Mandy is an angel for me; he was heaven-sent. I will love him forever.
The wonderful thing about theatre is the lessons one learns, the life experiences that accrue. And because it’s such a subjective profession, the lessons, good or bad, are deep. In the case of The Baker’s Wife, we all put aside any differences we might have had with one another’s personalities and bonded because we were in that hellhole together. We shed blood together. Mandy and I had known each other before Evita, but now we really became good friends.
It was Mandy who worked with me to make sure the audience understood what was going on. Evita is expositional. She was born; then when she was fifteen she hooked up with this guy, then she went here; when she was twenty, she went there. If you don’t know the story of her life, it can be very difficult to comprehend what’s happening onstage. Mandy and I worked very hard at connecting the dots.
Unfortunately, San Francisco was not an entirely happy experience for him, either. He got German measles from one of the kids. The theatre had to be disinfected. He was out for three weeks. I couldn’t wait for him to come back—so much did my performance and well-being depend on Mandy. He is a bright light.
It was also in San Francisco that the “arms in a V” pose at the end of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” was born. It happened when famed photographer Martha Swope joined us to shoot the pictures for the front of the theatre and for the program. Martha asked me to lift my arms, elbows slightly bent. That was Elaine Paige’s pose, and at that point I really didn’t want anyone else telling me to imitate Elaine.
“I don’t do that,” I told her. “I do this.” And then I raised my arms in a V. I did it spontaneously. I don’t know what I’d been doing at the end of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” before that day. I just know I’d never done the V before. Well, I thought, I guess that’s what I do now. It became my final pose in “Argentina,” and I took it with me to New York in September.
I used to have long talks with Peter Marinos, who, besides Mandy, became a close cast mate. He would come to my dressing room an hour before curtain, almost every night. We would talk about how the performances were going. Recently he recounted this story to me:
“High Flying, Adored.”
© MARTHA SWOPE/ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
“As I remember it, we were discussing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,’ and you said you felt it was cheesy to gesture in rhythm to the underscoring. I disagreed and said, ‘To me, looking up at the Casa Rosada, it looks stronger when your gestures are accompanied by the music.’ You were setting some of the moves, and after a couple performances, you asked me, ‘What does that look like?’ I said, ‘I think it looks great.’ Then we named the gestures you were doing because we had nothing better to do. This is what you did and what we named them: Right arm extended to descamisados—‘I love you.’ Left arm extended to descamisados—‘I love you.’ Both arms up in a V—’I’m fabulous.’ ”
Peter continued, “Then I suggested that on the final chord, just before the Casa Rosada revolved, you drop your head slightly to the side. I believed, subliminally, the audience would see Christ on the cross, and applaud. At first you said absolutely not. Then you tried it. For the first time, there was a full-on audience ovation mirroring the descamisados’ cheering. We had a good laugh after the show.”
When we did the Life magazine shoot for the New York opening, there was a picture of me with my arms outstretched. Below my picture was a picture of the actual Evita with her arms in that exact pose. I had never seen that picture before. She was, indeed, circling.
8
Evita, Part 2
NEW YORK AND SYDNEY, 1979–1981
Lana Turner and me backstage at Evita, July 14, 1980.
UPI/ANDY LOPEZ
Broadway, opening night. After two weeks of previews, we opened Evita at the Broadway Theater on September 25, 1979. The day we opened, I had the flu. I threw up in the sink at intermission, then went out and sang “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” A review from one of the critics called my performance “colorless.” No shit.
One of the few positive moments of opening night for me was a telegram from Kevin. It was simply one word: “InEVITAble!” I was very touched, and treasure that telegram to this day.
Robert Stigwood, our producer, held the opening night party at Xenon, a popular discotheque. I entered the main room to hear “Disco Evita” blaring over the PA system. I stayed for about an hour and then left. The place was loud and packed with clubbers, as well as the throngs from opening night. My best friend and date for the evening, Jeffrey Richman, had to crawl on his hands and knees among the shoes, handbags, and fallen food to extract himself from our table. Hal didn’t want to go to Xenon, so he and a select group took over what was then the back room of Joe Allen’s. Jeffrey and I joined him there and we waited for the reviews.
In those days, the New York Times building on West Forty-third Street still printed the newspaper, and the first printing would come out an hour or two before midnight. Opening night parties were thrilling or excruciating, depending on the reception of the show you were opening. Somebody would run to the Times building, bring back the first edition, and read it out loud on top of a dining table to a hushed and anxious crowd. The Times review was and still is the only review that counts for a show’s box office the next day. If the review is good, the party will continue into the wee hours. If it’s bad, the party will brea
k up, and everyone will exit rather quickly, taking bets on when they’ll see the closing notice posted on the call-board.
No one runs to the Times building anymore, sadly a lost tradition. The critics attending opening night is another lost tradition. Opening night curtain is always at seven o’clock. In the past, when we took our curtain calls, we would see critics dashing up the aisles to make their deadlines. Now they see the shows during the final week of previews. So why is opening night curtain still at seven? I don’t know, but I do miss seeing the backs of their heads as they made that mad dash up the aisle.
We opened Evita to indifferent reviews, cold reviews. At least a bad review elicits some sort of passion, but indifference … that’s the worst. This stunning production that Hal had mounted, and the amount of work that Mandy and I had put into those characters, was dismissed. As Hal read Walter Kerr’s review in the New York Times, I watched his face go a shade of red I’d never seen before. Hal’s production was innovative, but his accomplishment received scant acknowledgment from the press.
Why? For one thing, I believe there was resentment in the theatrical community, and also in the New York area itself, that the Nazi sympathizer Evita Perón was being glorified. Not only was there an active community of Argentine expatriates, but many people still remembered who the Peronistas were and what they had done. They were fascists, and a lot of Nazis found safe haven in Argentina after World War II. To many it appeared that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber—and all of us by extension—were glorifying fascists and the harborers of Nazi war criminals. Many in the theatre community were also upset because a British composer and lyricist were usurping what was an innately American art form.
In his review, Walter Kerr seemed to think that the creators were telling him what was happening rather than showing him. “It is rather like reading endless footnotes,” he wrote, “from which the text has disappeared, and it puts us into the kind of emotional limbo we inhabit when we’re just back from the dentist but the Novocain hasn’t worn off yet.… We’re not participants, we’re recipients of postal cards (and photographs) from all over. Which is a chilly and left-handed way to write a character musical.… You go home wondering why the authors chose to write a musical about materials they were going to develop so remotely, so thinly.”
It’s kind of true. The musical is expositional. You really had to read the chronology of events in the program to know the life of Eva Perón. Who reads the programs, anyway, even if you do know the story?
A week or so later, Mandy asked after the show, “Do you want to go to Joe Allen’s?” As we walked in silence down Eighth Avenue, the two of us simultaneously burst into tears—all that work ignored. It’s easier to get a bad notice than to be ignored.
After the reviews were in, Mandy and I had to work even harder. We had to lasso the audience and bring them to the stage every night. It wasn’t easy. The audience was pissed off the moment they walked into the theatre because they’d spent $35 a ticket on a flop. (Can you imagine how pissed off they’d be today, at $125 a pop?) They sat there scowling at the stage with their arms folded across their chests as if to say, Prove it. We ultimately did. The audience did get hooked; we turned it around. Word of mouth spread.
It took several months and seven Tony Awards, but Evita, a show that did not get good reviews in Los Angeles or San Francisco or New York, became a huge hit. If you didn’t see Evita in L.A., you saw it in New York—if you were lucky enough to get a ticket. Scalpers were on the street outside the theatre every night. That Halloween, Evita in her white dress was the preferred costume, especially among gay men in Greenwich Village. People who had never been inside a Broadway theatre came to the show because of the TV commercial. It was directed by Bob Giraldi, who directed the videos for Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” The Evita commercial was on all the time, day and night, for years. When Evita toured the country, they kept using it.
Odd things started happening to me. I received death threats. I had an FBI guy follow me around for a while. He was very cute. We had bomb threats. In the seventies, there was always a bomb scare on opening night. You didn’t have a proper opening night unless you saw the bomb squad and their dogs sweep the theatre before the seven o’clock curtain. It was kind of good luck for a show.
For this production we had several bomb scares because of Eva Perón, I’m convinced. One of my favorites was when I was onstage singing “Buenos Aires.” As the song was ending, I saw the spotlights flicker and then go out. I exited stage right to see a scared house manager standing with several cops and firemen.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Bomb scare,” they said.
“What are you going to do?” I asked. The police and firemen were trying to figure out when to stop the show and get the audience out.
“We can’t decide if we should stop the show now or after ‘Art of the Possible,’ ” they replied. It was an artistic decision.
“What if the bomb goes off during ‘Art of the Possible’?” I asked. Which, as far as I was concerned, was redundant.
Howard Haines, the general manager, was called on the phone. “Don’t you dare stop the show,” he said. “It’ll kill our box office.” So the cops and firemen went away. I guess they agreed it was better to kill a theatre full of people than future ticket sales.
One of my favorite things about Broadway is the juxtaposition—the incongruity—of guns and greasepaint, billy clubs and fishnets. Whenever you see a cop backstage, more likely than not he’s a member of the “theatre squad.” They protect you as you’re leaving the stage door, and direct the traffic and crowds in the Theatre District. NYPD’s finest from Midtown North and South are your best friends. I love to see them backstage. There’s something about showgirls and cops hanging out together around a stage door—it’s pure Damon Runyon, and it’s one of the great allures of Broadway for me. I’m still very close to the cop assigned to West Forty-fifth Street during my run in Master Class, Patrick (Hollywood) Cassidy.
Regardless of Evita’s success, I was still struggling with the singing, I still had the subversive alternate, and I still had stage management who didn’t lift a finger if they didn’t have to. The walk from my dressing room to the stage felt like a war zone, but I showed up every night and prayed that I’d get through it.
There’s no question that Hal Prince taught me invaluable lessons, but they came at a price. This was the beginning of the era of dual productions, which I abhor. Once you have dual productions, you have dueling performances, then comparisons—and someone always loses. In January 1980, less than four months after we opened on Broadway, Hal rolled out the L.A. company, with Loni Ackerman as Eva. Nevertheless, we all soldiered on, even after Hal returned from L.A. and told our company that the L.A. company was better than we were. Working with Hal was both exhilarating and painful: I will always be grateful to him for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime and for believing in me when others didn’t. That’s not to say there weren’t bumps in the road on the way to that Tony Award. I didn’t always understand his methods … or his madness. Looking back as I do on many of my trying theatrical experiences, I remember the words of a very wise person: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Or leaves you open to secondary infections.
The discipline I needed to play the part was intense. It was still all about the singing, an unbelievable struggle I had to face by myself. There was no Kevin; I missed him and wished we hadn’t broken up. There was also no life beyond the theatre. I was a monk—a very quiet monk. At home I turned the ringer off on my phone and turned down the volume on the answering machine. I was silent for at least fourteen hours a day. When it was time to vocalize, I turned on all the faucets in the apartment so I wouldn’t have to hear the first sound coming out of my mouth. I muscled my voice every night onstage. I willed it to hit the notes.
Now, when I listen to the album, it doesn’t sound to me like I was struggling, but I was, a
nd I continued to struggle all through the New York run. It started in the first ten minutes of the musical. If I didn’t hit the first D correctly, it affected the rest of the night, which affected the rest of the week. I was still working with David Vosburgh and he said great things to me: “Sing on your interest, not on your capital.” “Remember where you’re going tonight; remember where you’re going for the rest of the week.” It got easier as time passed, but I was never out of the woods.
Costume and wig fitting for the “Charity Concert” scene in Evita.
PAUL HUNTLEY
I was now considered a “star.” I didn’t change personalities or anything like that. I was trained enough and had been onstage long enough to know that it’s part of the territory. My reputation kept growing, however, as I fought more and more battles backstage. Those battles became public, and fodder for the press. There are moles in Broadway houses. No one knows who they are, but things that only people working on the show would know get printed in the most vicious ways.
Whatever. I would go to the theatre and leave the theatre in my “poor actor” street clothes, because as I see it, what’s the point of getting dressed up to take my clothes off to get into costume to get out of the costume to get dressed to go home? Carlos Gorbea, our dance captain, told me, “Patti, you’re a star. You must dress up!”