LuPone Works as True Diva Should

Pop divas come a dime a dozen. Broadway divas are a breed more rare. Take Patti LuPone, who sardonically reminded the audience Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa that she’s “a classically trained actress.”

A drama division graduate of the Juilliard School no less, LuPone claimed tongue-in-cheek that “all those old plays” she’d done were all “too long.” Shakespeare? What a mountain of words. His greatest play takes four hours. But she could do “Hamlet” in three minutes, tops. Which is definitely not a reason to go see “Patti LuPone on Broadway.”

But there are a handful of compelling reasons to catch her act. Three that come immediately to mind are “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from “Evita,” “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables” and “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from “Sunset Boulevard.”

LuPone is the original Broadway Evita, the creator of Fantine in “Les Miserables” and the first Norma Desmond on the London stage. If you want to see a star and hear her sing her heart out in their signature songs, this is your chance. She doesn’t disappoint. She wears her heart on her sleeve, precisely what each of those arias calls for, and puts on a performance that reaches the rafters.

Suavely wrapped in burgundy velvet for the first half of the show, LuPone opens with the upbeat “I Get a Kick Out of You” from Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.” (She starred in the 1987 hit revival of the show as Reno Sweeney.) On that tune, and later in the title song, LuPone gives an inkling of the fun she can be when properly revved. If she’s not Ethel Merman, the Ur-Broadway diva, she’s pretty close.

But she doesn’t stay upbeat for long. Except for Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out With My Baby” and “Let Yourself Go,” most of the first act is taken up by songs that ruminate about the sad and tragic. LuPone segues from “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” into “It Never Was You” and a sorrowful “Miss Lonely Hearts” medley.

Yet it isn’t until she gets to the Kurt Weill-Bertolt Brecht “Surabaya Johnny,” more than halfway through the first act, that she truly hits her melancholy stride. In that number we get a sense for the first time of how affecting LuPone can be as a figure of desperation and rejection. Though I still prefer Ute Lemper’s version of the song, here we can see the interpretive power that makes LuPone a star.

Her performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” on the other hand, was just loud. She starts as though she’s singing from the top of Mt. Everest, which leaves nowhere to go but down. And let’s not even talk about “Ain’t Nobody Here but Us Chickens,” a misguided attempt at humor that calls Bette Midler to mind and puts LuPone at a disadvantage.

The second act, which is the better half of the show, brings a change of pace. It also comes with a change of costume into an elegant white hourglass top and huge black hoop skirt. LuPone offers a few of her backstage stories between songs and occasionally drops the brittle show-biz mask that lets us see her in a looser, more personable light.

In addition to the previously mentioned songs from “Evita,” “Les Miserables” and “Sunset Boulevard,” LuPone provides a rundown of some of the numbers highlighting her Broadway history, among them “Meadowlark” from “The Baker’s Wife,” “As Long as He Needs Me” from “Oliver!” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” from the concert version of “Pal Joey.”

It’s a rich trove of material. The most revealing moment comes, though, when LuPone gets rid of her hand-held mike. Backed by her onstage band and a quartet of singers, jokingly called “my Mermen,” she delivers the ballad “Moonshine Lullaby” from “Annie Get Your Gun” without amplification.

Suddenly the husky voice we’ve been hearing all evening--straining for high notes, thick with shouts and whispers, full of purposeful catches in phrasing--takes on a pristine clarity of texture that makes you wish she’d done the whole show without a mike.

That would have turned all of “Patti LuPone on Broadway” into an electrifying show.

* “Patti LuPone on Broadway,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight-Sunday at 8 p.m. $19-$49.50. (213) 365-3500 or (714) 740-7878.