Patti LuPone

A Life in Notes

Groton Hill Music Center, Groton, MA, March 14, 2025

Reviewed by John Amodeo

If there is anyone in American musical theater who would be rightly described as Broadway royalty, it would have to be Patti LuPone, who has three Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards, and two Grammy Awards. Her sheer star power easily packed the 1,000-seat Concert Hall (mainstage) at The Groton Hill Music Center last week.

Thanks to the hall’s acoustically marvelous wood-paneled interior, we could luxuriate in the rich warm resonance of LuPone’s voice, which was astounding in both her trademark power belt and her fine head voice. As she has aged, she’s naturally needed to rely on her head voice for the high notes more frequently now that belting up there is more difficult. But she had full control of those lovely high notes, head voice or not, and no one complained. That small observation aside, LuPone was timeless. She looked youthful and svelte in her Act I black pant suit, and she moved nimbly about the stage like someone at least a generation younger than her 75 years.

LuPone performed her biographical show A Life in Notes with highly articulated precision, weaving story and song together and using each song as a touchstone for important moments in her life. She also helped us recall how we felt or where we were when we first heard a song, proving that music has the power to bring us back to a time and a place.

Act I focused on her youth and her coming of age during the 1950s and ‘60s with songs from that era. She appeared for Act II in an elegant silver-sequined evening gown with a matching floor-length cape and aimed a spotlight on her stage career. Here, she literally belted each song out of the park, mixing a few of her Broadway standards with some carefully selected pop and cabaret songs. Five standing ovations and two encores might tell you how thrilling this show was and what a consummate performer LuPone is. She made it perfectly clear that she was there to divert, delight, and entertain us, and one can only say, “mission accomplished.”

If her patter, written by Jeffrey Richman, felt a little rushed and over-scripted, it was also illuminating, sincere, and funny, and it clearly set up each song. By Act II, however, where her Broadway career spoke for itself, her patter was minimal, which let her flow easily from one song to another. Amazingly, throughout her biographical monologues and songs, her diction, notoriously spoofed in Forbidden Broadway, was meticulously clear even at break-neck speed. Director Scott Wittman may have had a hand in that and in the swift pacing.

One thing one can say about LuPone’s concerts and recordings is that she works with impressively talented accompanists. Here, as on the recording of this show, she had Joseph Thalken on piano and Brad Phillips on guitar and violin, and both provided stirring backup vocals, often in rich harmony. There were moments their backup vocals were so soft and delicate that one could barely hear them until they slowly dialed up the volume to support LuPone’s building vocals.

LuPone opened Act I with Leon Russell’s heartfelt “A Song for You,” in which she sang to all four sides of the house, as if she were singing to each one of us personally. After revealing her grade-school crushes on Tommy Kirk and Troy Donahue, she drifted into a passionate and rarely heard “Ebb Tide” (Robert Maxwell/Carl Sigman), evoking the many 1950s and ‘60s beach-set romances in which Donahue starred. Thalken’s and Phillips’ lush background vocals helped bring the song to a dramatic finish.

Between stories of her years at Juilliard and her early dramatic work with John Houseman, LuPone share two stunning ballads—“Alfie” (Burt Bacharach/Hal David) and “The Man That Got Away” (Harold Arlen/Ira Gershwin). Both were riveting, especially in the latter where Thalken’s near-orchestral piano accompaniment added to LuPone’s thrilling crescendo in the final section. A volcanic “Some People” (Jule Styne/Steven Sondheim) and a rousing “Those Were the Days” (Boris Fomin/Gene Raskin) gave us a hint of what Act II would bring.

She opened Act II with “On Broadway” (Barry Mann/Cynthia Weil/Jerry Leiber/Mike Stoller) backed up by Phillips’ beautiful solo guitar, which brought the focus to her Broadway career. When she got to the line “They say that I won’t last too long on Broadway,” she finished it with a triumphant “Ha!” That led into her sequence of Broadway signature songs, beginning with “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” (Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice), which showcased her powerful vocals and impressive acting skills. She dove deep into the emotion of “I Dreamed a Dream” (Claude-Michel Schőnberg/Herbert Kretzmer) so much that a loud sob burst forth on the line, “Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.” She wiped away tears as she turned to the piano. The audience lept to its feet.

We all could have left happily after that, but she continued right into “The Ladies Who Lunch” (Sondheim), defiantly raising into the air a martini that had miraculously appeared on the piano. In the middle of the song, she took a sip, then leveled a conflicted stare at the martini, as if asking whether to drink or not to drink. This sent her into a wildly theatrical finish that brought the house to its feet a second time, but far from the last.

But Act II wasn’t all eleven o’clock numbers; LuPone is too smart for that. She included some beautiful and poignant pop songs including “Stars” (Janis Ian) that was so heart-wrenching you could hear a pin drop. The tender “To Make You Feel My Love” (Bob Dylan) was made even more poignant with Phillips’ wistful guitar. LuPone’s finale, “Forever Young” (Marian Gold/Bernhard Lloyd/Frank Mertens) gave us her blessing for eternal youth. Here, LuPone unleashed a smaple of her highest belting that she had been saving up, beautifully underscored by Thalken’s gorgeous piano accompaniment and Phillip’s moving violin.

Phillips is a real find, and LuPone and Thalken let him step into the spotlight in the first of two encores, a thigh-slapping “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” (Patsy Montana), where Phillips went to town with some spirited fiddle playing that rendered Thalken and LuPone genuinely slack jawed. LuPone’s final gift was a sincere show of gratitude with a quiet “In My Life” (Paul McCartney/John Lennon) that perfectly capped a most electrifying evening of entertainment.