Here’s some interesting trivia. When Patti LuPone landed the role of Eva Perone in Evita, she got little to no advice from Andrew Lloyd Webber regarding how to portray her. The first person to land a role is charged with creating the character, not just singing the score. Her stature, pronunciation and verbal rhythm, gesturing and more. Subsequent actresses use that initial mold as a model to embellish. She initially struggled with the range and strained her vocal cords on several occasions. It’s a challenging score, if not the most difficult.
When I first heard the score to Evita, I thought Andrew Lloyd Webber hated women, because the score’s written in a soprano’s passaggio. If you think of a rubber band and you pull a rubber band, the weakest spot is in the middle. That’s a passaggio. You have a chest voice and a head voice, and then right in the middle is where you have to negotiate changing gears and all of the high notes are written in that break. Also, if you want to play the role with accuracy and passion, it can’t be lyrical. So you have to imbue that music with that energy and that tone and that was the danger. That was the danger because I blew out my voice so many times.”
Determined not to fail, LuPone saw Evita as her “test” and she needed to push through her fear.
I saw her in the original production on a Wednesday night, meaning she already did a matinee a few hours before. Well, her voice gave out in the night session and a stage hand rushed a microphone to her rescue. Being a Broadway nerd that’s a memory, likely not for Patti.
In her autobiography she explains how she created the gestural movement to complete the Evita persona. She was living in a not so great apartment in a not so great part of Manhattan. The building had a mice problem, so she set fresh glue traps every morning before heading off to rehearsal. When she came home, there was a fresh new catch perched on the glue trap. They were usually still alive and struggling to free themselves. Patti would study them during their torture. From that she got inspiration for hand gestures that stretched away from her core while maintaining her center/abdominals for the power and range required. She asked for some of the higher ranges be brought down. Webber refused. Why? He never wanted her for the role and hoped she’d bomb. Elaine Page was actually the first Evita in London’s West End yet never did Broadway. The producers wanted an American with some recognition on the Great White Way, so he didn’t make things easy for Patti, intentionally scoring her songs to fall in the most challenging part of her range.
A few years later, she was performing Nora Desmond in the Los Angeles workshop of Sunset Boulevard, which preceded the NYC premier. Andrew opted for Glenn Close instead, hearing the news while boarding the plane from LAX to JFK.mm
- She sued him and won and thanks Andrew for her swimming pool.
- A twenty five year feud ensued.
- Lesson: Don’t mess with Patti.