Patti LuPone

Oh Dear! Patti Lupone Took My Advice and Now Broadway Wants Her “Cancelled”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Back in November of last year, I wrote about the silly–but instructive—Broadway feud between diva Patti Lupone and performer Kecia Lewis, who is black, and who has received some accolades herself. Lewis was starring in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical about the life and career of Alicia Keys in a theater that shared a wall with the theater featuring “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and LuPone. The amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” at two points in the musical could be heard by the audience LuPone’s show, so LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at those points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. (The producer of “The Roommate”should have handled that, but Patti has power and influence and has never been shy about using them.) “Hell’s Kitchen” complied. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

But Lewis decided to play the race card, because that’s what so many of the Woke of Color have been taught to do, because it works. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for supposedly engaging in race-based “microagressions.” I wrote in “Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis ‘Oh, Bite Me!’” that I was ” hoping against hope that LuPone, who is the epitome of a diva (as this Ethics Alarms post demonstrates), either issues an emphatic “Bite Me!” to Lewis or ignores her completely as not worthy of attention from Patti’s perch on Broadway Olympus. Lewis is the racist here; she is the one who is stereotyping a white performer as insensitive and dismissive.”

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On Bill Maher’s Calculated Flip-Flop and Patti Lupone’s “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Hypocrisy

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Bill Maher of HBO’s obnoxious “Real Time” is being reviled and repudiated by his mostly Trump-Hate obsessed fans because of the clip above, where he appeared to say sincerely, in effect, “Gee, President Trump doesn’t seem like such a bad guy after all when you meet him!” But Bill Maher doesn’t say anything sincerely. I have pointed this out more than once in 2025: like so many media-dependent weasels before him, Maher has made the ruthless calculation that simply bashing everything Trump does now will make him just another screaming voice among the Deranged, so he has to find a more nuanced identity if he’s going to get headlines. Despite the fact that he had cheered on the worst of the Angry Left’s stunts and outrages for years and derided anyone with an (R) next to their name as a (I’m quoting now) fascist, idiot, liar, “cunt” (for the women) or worse, now he is suddenly a voice of fairness and moderation.

The tale of the Scorpion and the Frog comes to mind. Maher was never a legitimate pundit, and his favor can be easily purchased with a ticket to notoriety. With Democrats thoroughly disgracing themselves daily, it didn’t take much analysis for a professional iconoclast to conclude that the smart move was to buck the Blue.

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Dear Patty LuPone: Please, PLEASE Tell Kecia Lewis “Oh, Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Does this outrageous story of contrived race-baiting on Broadway relate to tomorrow’s election? Sure it does. I’ll explain after you finish gagging following the facts of the incident.

Kecia Lewis  is a talented black Broadway actress. She won a Tony for her performance in “Hell’s Kitchen,” a 2024 jukebox musical (that means the show has no original music and uses previous pop hits to try to tell a story). The show, about the life and career of Alicia Keys, shares a wall with another Broadway theater and creates a problem that actors, directors and producers have complained about for decades: the amplified sound in “Hell’s Kitchen” can be heard by the audience of the show next door. (You know when you’re in a multi-screen “cineplex” watching an intimate drama and the movie showing in the next theater is “Pearl Harbor”? It’s like that.)

The show next door to “Hell’s Kitchen” is “The Roommate,” a quiet, two-actor drama starring Mia Farrow and Broadway legend Patti LuPone of “Evita” fame. LuPone sent a polite note to the “Hell’s Kitchen” producers asking them to turn down the volume at two points in the sound design that were loud enough to interfere with her show. They did. LuPone, in gratitude, sent a thank-you note to the producers and flowers to the stage management and sound staff.

In a normal world, that would be the end of it. I’m certain this exact scenario has played out many times over the years as simple professional courtesy and consideration. Ethics!

But no. Kecia Lewis decided to be offended. She posted a video on Instagram reprimanding LuPone for engaging in “microagressions.” She complained,  

 “After our sound design was adjusted, [you] sent flowers to our sound and stage management team thanking them”… “I want to explain what a microaggression is – These are subtle, unintentional comments or actions that convey stereotypes, biases or negative assumptions about someone based on their race. Microaggressions can seem harmless or minor, but can accumulate and cause significant stress or discomfort for the recipient. Examples include calling a Black show loud in a way that dismisses it. In our industry, language holds power and shapes perception, often in ways that we may not immediately realize. Referring to a predominantly Black Broadway show as loud can unintentionally reinforce harmful stereotypes, and it also feels dismissive of the artistry and the voices that are being celebrated on stage. Comments like these can be seen as racial microaggressions, which have a real impact on both artists and audiences. While gestures like sending thank you flowers may appear courteous, it was dismissive and out of touch, especially following a formal complaint that you made that resulted in the changes that impacted our entire production, primarily the people who have to go out on stage and perform.” 

Yes, she really says that. She does. I’m not making it up! This insufferable actress not only felt that was a reasonable response to a request, a thank-you, and flowers, but decided to issue her complaint publicly rather than having the guts to tell LuPone that she’s a racist to her face.

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Broadway Ethics: Unethical Audiences, Unethical Actress

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

1. From Actor’s Equity:

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the creation and distribution of photographs and videos of our members during a nude scene. As actors, we regularly agree to be vulnerable onstage in order to tell difficult and challenging stories. This does not mean that we agree to have those vulnerable moments widely shared by anyone who feels like sneaking a recording device into the theater. Whoever did this knew not only that they were filming actors without their consent, but also that they were explicitly violating the theater’s prohibition on recording and distribution.

“At every performance, there is a mutual understanding between the audience and the performers that we are sharing an experience limited to this time and place; that trust makes it possible for us to be exposed both emotionally and physically.  Trampling on this agreement by capturing and distributing these photographs and videos is both sexual harassment and an appalling breach of consent. It is a violation that impedes our collective ability to tell stories with boldness and bravery.”

This completely accurate statement was prompted by an audience member taking forbidden photos of former “Grey’s Anatomy” star Jesse Williams during in a nude scene in the Broadway revival of “Take Me Out” and putting them online. The theater, Second Stage, also made a public statement condemning the conduct.

2. “The theater is a temple of virtue signaling! Bow, peasant!” Patti Lupone, long-time Broadway diva and the original “Evita” (in the musical, that is) confronted an audience member from the stage as she performed in the Broadway revival of “Company.” The audience member was wearing her mask below her nose.

Of course LuPone wasn’t wearing a mask at all, but never mind. Those are the rules on Broadway. “Put your mask over your nose, that’s why you’re in the theater!” she lectured, obviously breaking character. “That is the rule. If you don’t want to follow the rule, get the fuck out! Who do you think you are that you do not respect the people that are sitting around you!”

Then the audience cheered, because they are mostly Good Germans who put up with the garbage edicts of the reliably progressive virtue-signalling theaters and pay absurd amounts of money to sit in discomfort wearing useless cloth masks. I suspect that the audience member had the mask down below the nose because glasses fog up otherwise, and it’s really stupid to pay over a hundred bucks to sit in a dark theater blind. In Patti’s defense, masks are the rule, the House makes the rules, and she was technically correct that the target of her abuse was breaking them. On the other side of the ledger, it’s not her job to enforce the rules, and though audiences love seeing anything out of the ordinary like av actress berating a patron, LuPone sacrificed the performance to indulge her grandstanding. She has no respect, clearly, for the audience or her fellow cast members.

If I were the mask-felon, I would have left, and sorely tempted to shout out, “You’re the one who should be masked with that mug!”

But that would have been unethical…