Northport-raised Patti LuPone on Audra McDonald: 'She's not a friend'

Outspoken Broadway star Patti LuPone, who was born and raised in Northport, says she and fellow theater icon Audra McDonald have a long-standing rift that recently deepened with McDonald’s social-media support of a critic of LuPone’s.

"She’s not a friend," three-time Tony Award winner LuPone, 76, said of current "Gypsy" star McDonald, a record-setting six-time Tony winner, in a New Yorker interview posted Monday. When writer Michael Schulman asked what LuPone thought of the "Gypsy" revival, “[S]he stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds," he wrote. "Then she turned to the window and sighed, ‘What a beautiful day.’"

The contretemps originally arose in November, after LuPone had complained publicly that the sound level of the musical "Hell’s Kitchen" was bleeding into the adjacent theater where LuPone and Mia Farrow were starring in the limited-run comedy "The Roommate."

At her stage manager’s suggestion, per The New Yorker article, LuPone contacted the head of the Shubert Organization, which owns both theaters, asking for help with the distracting noise. The "Hell’s Kitchen" producers complied. At some point, LuPone in a cellphone video with fans seeking autographs says of a "Hell’s Kitchen" Playbill being proffered, "I'm not signing a ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ — they’re too loud."

This led actor Kecia Lewis, 59, a Tony Award-winner for "Hell’s Kitchen," to post a long Instagram video as an open letter to LuPone accusing her of bullying and being "racially microaggressive," particularly for "calling a Black show ‘loud’ in a way that dismisses it."

"Oh, my God," LuPone told Schulman after he brought up the incident, and went on to use obscenities toward Lewis. When the writer noted McDonald had given the video supportive emoji in the now-deleted comments section, LuPone replied, "Exactly. And I thought, ‘You should know better.’ That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend."

McDonald’s representatives did not respond to a Newsday request for comment. Neither she, LuPone nor Lewis has commented publicly on the article.

LuPone also talked about growing up on an apple orchard amid farmland in Northport, then a modest fishing village. Her mother’s parents were bootleggers during Prohibition, and the LuPone house still had a room with removable floorboards for hiding whiskey. Her maternal grandfather was murdered in 1927, possibly with the involvement of his wife.

Orlando LuPone, Patti and her twin brothers’ father, was an elementary-school principal who had affair with a substitute teacher. Patti LuPone recalled one evening when her mother took her and her siblings to a town nearby. "We sneaked up to this house and looked in the basement window, and there was my dad sitting in a chair and this woman sitting at his knees, and my mother put her fist through the cellar window," she said.
Her parents’ divorce when she was 12 freed the children from their father’s pressure to become teachers. "My brothers were freaked out more than I was," LuPone said. "I said to [my brother] Bobby, ‘Honey, we’re free to pursue show business now!’" Their mother took Patti to voice lessons, and the children formed a dance trio that performed on the TV talent show "The Original Amateur Hour."