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Patti LuPone vs Audra McDonald | The history behind the shocking Broadway feud drama
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Mickey Jo
So I don't wish to alarm you, but the captain civil war of the Broadway world may have just happened. In this metaphor, Audra McDonald is obviously Captain America. Patti LuPone is obviously Tony Stark and honestly, it's not a good look. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I'm a theatre critic, content creator and pundit here on social media and I was just editing a completely different video when I started to see more and more responses to a Patti LuPone profile interview in the New Yorker in which she made some controversial statements. Which is not news in and of itself because controversy and drama has followed Patti LuPone throughout her decades long career. A career that has spanned the stage and screen, multiple Tony Award wins, iconic performances, playing herself in various cameos. She has become as Patti LuPone the Persona just as iconic as any of the roles that she's created on stage. Which include, but are not limited to Broadway's original Ava Perron, the world's original Fantine in Les Miserables, as well as celebrated performances of Joanne & Co. Rose in Gypsy, Reno Sweeney in Anything Goes and more. But even before she was fired from the role of Norma Desmond in the North American transfer of Sunset Boulevard, another role which she created for the stage in the original London production and subsequently, you know, won a lot of money in a lawsuit and named a swimming pool for Angelo Webber and did batting practice in the dressing room even before that. There has been an air of constant drama around Patti LuPone, a lot of which has made her beloved, especially within a particular subsection of musical theatre fan. Yes, gay men, I'm talking about us. But there comes a point when something is said and you really have to take a step back and consider whether the shade throwing is just not fun anymore. And though I never thought we'd see the day, here we are with Patti LuPone publicly calling out multi Tony Award winning Broadway legend Audra McDonald. And this is shocking and upsetting because they're both multi Tony Award winning Broadway legends. They are both icons of the stage who prior to this in years past have shared the stage in, in so many different productions, not often on Broadway, but at the Ravinia Festival where they did a whole host of Sondheim shows together and in concert stagings of things and possibly even in Master Class if Audra I think was still in the show when Patti LuPone replaced playing Maria Callas. But certainly they have worked very closely for a long time, especially in the world of Sondheim. I had no idea that there had been a huge rift in their friendship, but evidently there has been. And Patti LuPone, as ever, is gonna talk about it. And while we don't know the origins of that particular feud, we do know the context around why Patty is talking about it now. So in a particularly unhinged theater News recap from me, let's scan through this New Yorker article. Let me tell you what I think about all of this, and let's all take a moment together to really take in this new, divided Broadway battleground on which we find ourselves. As always, I'm completely desperate to know what everyone else is thinking. Please do let me know all of your thoughts around this and the statements that have been made in this pie. The comments section down below. Do you agree with where I sit on it? Let me know how we're feeling. Remembering, of course, that everyone invoked in this piece is a real human being who has led a considerable life in a difficult business. Honestly, I'm a little glad Stephen isn't alive to see this. Let's just get into it. What is going on with Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald? So this story has subsequently been picked up by a couple of outlets including people.com who have just raced to the juicy bit, but it comes from a piece published today by Michael Shulman in the New Yorker. It's a profile on Patti LuPone, leading with the headline Patti LuPone is done with Broadway and almost everything else Right Beneath that It says the 76 year old theatre diva, a word that I'm not sure she cares for necessarily. Famed and feared for her salty bravado dishes on Hal Prince, her non friendship with Audra McDonald right there in the top. They know they're going to suck you in with that one. And sexy but dumb New York Rangers. I'll be honest, I skipped that paragraph. I may circle back to it and I will say the article itself is very long. It is worth a read because the little wild extraordinary nuggets of completely bizarre information that I have never known previously about Patti LuPone but all of which paint, you know, the vivid picture of how she came to be the woman that she is, I think are worth paying attention to. I'm going to bring you through some of the highlights. We begin with her having just recorded some post production dialogue tweaks for a guest appearance on and Just like that, the Sex and the City reboot in which she is playing an Italian mother, the relevance of which to the piece is that when she finishes this, she says, think of me, meaning for all your future television projects, because I don't want to be on stage anymore. Period. And this follows up to comments that she's made previously when she publicly declared she was giving back her Equity card and she was done with the circus that was Broadway. And in fact, what she really meant here more than anything else was the actual geographical area. And she talks about that in this piece as well, that she is no fan of Times Square. And honestly, I get that. Also worth pointing out that since making those statements, giving up her Equity card and declaring that she was done with Broadway, she has since worked on Broadway this past season in the Roommate opposite Mia Farrah, who was just nominated for a Tony Award. Patti LuPone was not. That may be pertinent later on. Some dramatic foreshadowing for you there. Let's carry on with this. So though she needs no introduction, there's a whole paragraph here talking about some of her more famous moments, some of her more iconic roles and viral interviews denouncing Donald Trump as well as various poorly behaved audience members, including, but not limited to the woman who was texting on her phone during Patty's Off Broadway appearance in a play, as well as the woman at the company talkback who claimed that she paid her salary. Patti LuPone, a magnet for Broadway's Karens since the 1970s. As Michael Shulman goes on to talk about her screen work and her having joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a witch in Agatha all along, he notes a quote from Aubrey Plaza, who also appeared alongside her in that TV show and lived with Patti LuPone when she was doing an Off Broadway play. Aubrey Plaza said, said, and I quote, she doesn't give a shit about what anyone thinks. That again, will be relevant as we move through this article. So the next thing that happens is LuPone is being driven up 8th Avenue and as it goes past the theatre district, she explains why she is, at least for now. Note that done with Broadway. And you'll remember from a few moments ago, she said that before and then worked at the booth. She said, I'm so angry at whoever choked the stem right in the middle by making Times Square a pedestrian mall. And apparently when she was starring in Company, she would carry a bullhorn and yell at pedestrians her car window. What is her issue with this and all the traffic of Times Square, you may be wondering? Well, it's a logistical one. She says it's impossible for us to get to work. And I said that years ago. So I Start work angry. I can't get to my theater because of the traffic pattern, because of the arrogance of the people in the streets. It's a road. Get out of the street. And I can understand from my handful of visits to New York at various times of the year the challenges of trying to navigate the Times Square Theatre district. Though admittedly I'm attempting to do so via public transport and as a pedestrian and not in a car paid for by the show's producers, I'm assuming. Allegedly. Allegedly. Please don't sue me. Then we have a really extraordinary paragraph where it's noted that she prefers the New York of the 60s and 70s. And I quote, sure the city was broke, sure there were muggers, and sure she heard someone getting literally murdered outside of her window in Chelsea, but the city was bankrupt, dangerous and creative. It's giving back. In my day, all of this was fields, except those particular fields were dangerous side streets where young women were getting stabbed. Let's carry on. She says that she worries that the gaiety phase of Broadway, when it was just Follies and Ziegfeld Girls, is what the now corporate theatre has reverted to. And I will say that I'm not sure I can agree with this, at least for the current Broadway season, because I think now more so than ever, and particularly this year, and honestly, lately we're seeing a lot of really innovative, exciting creative work. The finances of Broadway are absolutely warped and skewed and perhaps irrevertibly damaged. And in many ways it has become more inaccessible, more elitist than it has ever been before. But I don't think that's what she's talking about here. She's talking about the actual art itself. And I get it, Sondheim died. But here is the thing. Shows like maybe happy ending like Dead Outlaw. I'm just having heard things about this, I haven't seen it yet. Like Kimberly Akimbo, like a strange loop. Over the last few years we have seen a great many really brilliant pieces of theatre. Alongside that there are a lot of star driven works, a lot of commercial works. I'm sure it isn't lost on Patti LuPone. That many tickets to her most recent play appearance was sold on the back of the appearance of Mia Farrow alongside her. But it isn't just Broadway. We go on to note she's even angrier at the rest of the country. She told me more than once that the Trumpified Kennedy center should get blown up. I have just a hilarious image of her just repeating this throughout the day that she spent with this writer. And you may be wondering, Mickey Jo, you haven't talked about the Kennedy center of it all yet, and I was so close to making a video when things first went down. And every time I have gone to sit down to talk about what's happening to the Kennedy center, something else else extraordinary happens to the Kendi Center. So I'm kind of waiting for the momentum of it all to decelerate so that I can talk about everything. And it's going to be an evolving story and it's going to keep happening. But at the very least I'm trying to just let that first phase of it play out completely. I will talk about what's happening at the Kennedy center, and I don't share the exact sentiment of what should happen to it because I think we need to think about the poor staff who work there. But I do understand the emotions of where that is coming from. Patty, I get it now. Here comes some of those bizarre highlights that I told you about. We're going to skim through the best of them. She berates the two women at the table next to them for talking too loudly. She orders a fried artichoke sliced in half. She recalls being punished by her parents when she wandered away from home at the age of 4 in Long island and got sidetracked by some birds and butterflies. It is giving Little Red in Into the woods, is it not? Which pales honestly in comparison to the story of her mother taking Patty and her siblings to go and catch her father having to affair with a substitute teacher. She's 12 at this point, but she's delighted about the divorce because, as she said to her brother Bobby, who went on to become a very successful dancer, honey, we're free to pursue show business now. No wonder this woman did Gypsy. It was basically her life. There's a completely unhinged section about her experiences at Juilliard and with Kevin Kline, which goes some of the way towards explaining why she speaks the way that she does, which until now was objectively one of life's great unanswered questions. And then we get to a name that gave me a little bit of pause, especially knowing where this article is going to end up with her denouncing whatever friendship she ever had with Audrey McDonald. We get to her meeting the young playwright David Mamet. This is years ago. No one here is young anymore. He cast her along with then flame Kevin Klein in his play All Men Are Whores at Yale Cabaret, and she noted that she felt at home with Mamet's Dialogue, its raw aggression gave language to her own. The writing, once I understood the rhythm, became the easiest thing to speak, she said. I learned more about acting from David Mamet than I learned in four years at Juilliard. And the reason that this is particularly egregious is Patty has been so politically outspoken, and David Mamet is now very maga, very make America great again, very pro Trump. And that's something that gets said of a lot of people. Let me quantify that with some details. David Mamet in 2022 said Trump did a great job as president. This in the same interview where he cast aspersions on the results of the 2020 elections. How does he feel now? Does he feel differently? Well, here's another interview from 2024. He said Trump was the best president since Abraham Lincoln. He brought peace to the Middle east. He closed the border. He made us an energy exporter. He said he's got a big mouth. So do I. The question is, who do you like in a fair fight with your back to the wall? Who would you rather have? Joe Biden, who's a senile old bag man, or Donald Trump, who's a scrapper and loves his country? He also talks about free speech, about Judaism in America, about Israel, and about cancel culture, politics, critics, who he says have always been a bunch of brainless whores. And on, on audiences. He says very similar things to what Patti LuPone has said about Broadway recently. He says New York is now Disneyland. I don't want to see a play which is thought provoking. What the hell do I care? I want to have either a thrill or a dog treat. And the dog treat is diversity. Please tell me I'm not a racist. I'm not a transphobe. These people are shaking the audience down. I'm not even sure I understand what's happening here, but I'm not trying to make this video all about David Mamet. My point is all of that Patti LuPone has no problem with, despite their, their enormous this chasm of ideological difference politically between the two of them. And she has made no secret about how she feels about Trumpism. She wants to blow up the Kennedy center, hopefully with no one inside the building. But Mamet, she will continue to work with. And it's at this point that I'm going to skip far ahead through the article. There's plenty said in here about her experiences working on Evita, which it seems was not a pleasant one. I do want to point out I'd always wondered if you've ever seen the Kennedy Center Honours celebration of Barbara Cook. Pat Patty performs during that medley, as does Audra McDonald. She closes the thing, as does Glenn Close. Glenn sang Losing My Mind, Audra sang Till There Was you from the Music man, and Patti LuPone gave it. I'm gonna love you like nobody's love you Come rain, I'll come shine. And I was always wondering, what was the conversation backstage between Patty and Glenn, who, of course famously played Norma Desmond on Broadway, the role that was meant to be Patty's contractually. And apparently when Close took a seat next to LuPone, she said, I had nothing to do with it, and that the first time they had spoken, that's almost two decades later. And LuPone goes on to recall that what she wanted to say was bull. She doesn't actually share what she did say in reply. There's also a bit of a comment in how could there not be on that moment, one of the most defining moments of her career, when, during the penultimate performance of Gypsy on Broadway, she scolded someone for taking pictures and stopped the show. For years, this has been celebrated as her standing up for theatre etiquette and integr. And only more recently did it come to light that this individual was a photographer who was meant to be there, something that clearly wasn't communicated throughout the building. And so, you know, that's not necessarily an opportunity to attribute blame to Patty, but certainly the story isn't as empowering as it once was and has to really suck for that photographer. Oh, here's another absolutely wild detail. She once had a flock of chickens named Marilyn Rita, Eartha Foghorn Leghorn and the fabulous Miller sisters, Pia Alexandra and Marie Chantal, who were massacred in a raccoon attack. There's talk of her famous New Year's Eve party, her clubbing in Los Angeles after the GLAAD Awards with Dylan Mulvaney. And before we get to the really juicy section that I know you want to hear about, this is quite telling. She says, we start in life, vulnerable, then we are accosted, and then we put up the barriers. We put up the armor. I've never lost my vulnerability. So the shock continues. I firmly believe this. It's better to fail because you learned so much more. If you are anointed, you have nowhere to go. Failure makes you investigate, failure moves you to the next step. So then we arrive at Patti LuPone back on Broadway after saying that she wasn't going to be at the Booth Theatre doing the Roommate opposite Mia Farrow. I saw the play. I enjoyed the play. Mia Farrow had the more luminous central character, and Patti LuPone I thought, did really good, grounded, naturalistic work. It wasn't anywhere near as showy as some of the roles that she's previously played. And it's for that reason and not for, you know, anything lacking in her performance that I think Mia got a Tony nomination and Patti didn't. For what it's worth, Broadway has also seen Patti LuPone be extraordinary in so many other roles, and Mia Farrow was something of a newer surprise and revelation. But this is where the Audra McDonald of it all begins to become a problem. So I'm going to read this paragraph to you just to really drive up towards this in slow motion. So Shulman writes, she had told me about co starring with Mia Farrow in the two woman play the Roommate last fall, which I believe she already entered into, by the way, on something of the back foot because she said in interviews at the time she was not the first choice to be opposite Mia in the play. And she noted that she may not have even been the second choice for all she knew, but that it was originally meant to be Annette Bening. Anyway, back to the article, and this is a quote from Patty. There was a little bit of bullshit that went down and then I washed my hands of a couple of people in the business and we're about to find out who those people were. One of them apparently was a press agent who after an offstage blow up, grabbed a bottle of champagne from his office and gave it to LuPone to make amends, not realizing that the label read Happy opening Sunset Boulevard, which of course was opening around time. Now, Patty later went to go and see Nicole in Sunset Boulevard and had great things to say about the production and about Nicole's performance, which we can read a little into that later on as well. But that is an objectively very funny thing that happened that's like right out of Smash. I'm sorry. Anyway, here is where the trouble starts. The roommate at the Booth Theater shared a wall with a neighboring show, Hell's Kitchen, the Alicia Keys jukebox semi bio musical which is at the Shubert and sound would bleed through. If you've seen any of my New York vlogs and you' seen us standing on Schubert Alley opposite Junior's restaurant. On one side is the Shubert Theatre, on the other side is the Booth and they share this back wall and the stages are next to each other. And at the time Patti raised an issue because obviously they were playing the same show schedules. Hell's Kitchen is a jukebox musical with very contemporary music, with hip hop with a lot of loud amplification. And the Roommate is a quiet two hander play. So you're obviously going to be able to hear Hell's Kitchen through the wall coming into the Booth Theatre, which is to a certain extent disruptive. It's also nothing new. This has happened in these old adjoining theatre buildings for a long time. I recall seeing plays at the Apollo Theatre here in London, where in years past you used to be able to feel the bass of Thriller live and the Michael Jackson music coming through the sidewall, not to mention the rumble that you feel underneath you at somewhere like the Garrick Theatre when the underground passes. Anyway, at her stage manager's suggestion, LuPone called Robert Wankel, the head of the Schubert organization, and asked him if he could fix the noise problem once it was taken care of. She sent thank you flowers to the musical's crew. She was surprised then when Keisha Lewis, described here as an actress in Hell's Kitchen, in fact, one of the Tony Award winning original stars of Hell's Kitchen, let's put that in there, posted a video on social media speaking as one veteran to another, and called LuPone's actions bullying, racially microaggressive and rooted in privilege because she had labeled a black show Lash, which is a little bit reductive in terms of what was said. This was a lengthy social media video articulating why this felt hurtful and why this felt surprising for a black woman in the industry and why, you know, it was sort of indicative of the personalities involved and the different way that they were being treated when LuPone's request was immediately resolved and immediately taken care of. I also think that a lot of that has to do with the way that Patty asked the question. But let's really dig into this issue before we move on, because it is a problem. It's an undeniable logistical problem of having these two theaters back to back and one of them being an amplified musical and the other being a play. And yet, like I said, it is nothing new. And there have been musicals at the booth before. Kimberly Akimbo was at the booth, I believe at the same time as Hell's Kitchen had already started playing there and Kimberly Akimbo had book scenes that weren't underscored with music. So you still would have had sound bleed moments. And I forget exactly what the solution was or whether it was just that Hell's Kitchen were forced to lower their volume, which obviously is gonna feel a certain type of way to the cast and to that company being told that they are too loud. Honestly, they also got there first, and then the roommate moved in next door and started complaining about the noise disruption. It's always a difficult situation. If these were real people living in adjoining properties. Only if you're an actual human living in a residence, you have a choice whether or not to play loud music. And Hell's Kitchen know that's their M.O. that's what they're going to do. It's not like they're doing it for the sheer thrill and glee of it. That's just what the show is. It's what the show needs to be. And so I really do understand the feelings that must have emerged when all of this went down. At the same time. I don't think it was willfully, racially microaggressive. I think it can be felt that way without it having been intended that way. I think from Patty's perspective, it was just like this loud show is obnoxious to her, coming through the wall when she's trying to do a serious theater. And that's probably all that there was to it. And I think more than anything else, a lot of the frustration here had to do with the fact that someone like a Patti LuPone could have her requests met so quickly and so swiftly when I'm sure if a lot of other people had complained, nothing would have been resolved. I mean, how many other Broadway performers could even get on a personal phone call with the head of the Shubert Organization to make these kind of demands in the first place? So there is a certain amount of privilege that was at play here. But I don't feel as though that's something that Patti would ever be about to acknowledge. Because as we learn in much of this article, Patti never see seems to have thought of herself as a person with any real sense of privilege. She seems to have felt as though she's forged much of her career on a battleground where she is fighting against constant oppression. But I'll go on because this is where it really gets a little bit egregious. So in response to the accusations of bullying and racial microaggressions on social media, which, you know, admittedly, if everyone is being their most grown, evolved selves, could have happened private privately rather than on social media. But, you know, again, people have feelings. LuPone said, here's the problem. She calls herself a veteran. This about Keisha Lewis, the Tony Award winner. Let's find out how many Broadway shows Keisha Lewis has done because she doesn't know what the F she's talking about. And then she googled and said she's done seven, I've done 31. Don't call yourself a vet, bitch. And this is immediately facts checked in the article to say the correct numbers are actually Keisha's done 10 shows rather than seven seven. And Patti's only done 28 rather than 31. And since Keisha Lewis also made her Broadway debut decades ago, they have both been working for a significantly long time on Broadway. The fact that Patty has done more shows in the interim only means that she has been hired more, which again could circle back to a conversation about privilege and could circle back to the very thing that made this a personal, passionate issue for Keisha in the first place. And Patty is so close to acknowledging that here, but instead she calls her A and says she has no right to call herself a veteran. Because if you haven't done as many Broadway shows as Patti LuPone has, then you don't know as much. Apparently she even says about the noise problem. This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared. And I just think if she's cognizant of all of that, it's even more classless for her to describe Keisha the way that she has here. I think there's no dignity to this whatsoever. And Keisha is a veteran. Of course Patti LuPone is as well, but they are both veterans of the Broadway stage. As I've said, there is no excus for the way that she's spoken about her in this article. It's dreadful. It's terrible manners. And then this next and final paragraph is where all of the drama has come from. And I can't decide whether this is particularly great journalism or just messy behavior from Michael Shulman. But he then mentions to Patti LuPone after this conversation that Audra McDonald, the Tony decorated Broadway star, had given the video what he describes as supportive emotional emojis. To which Patti LuPone replied, exactly and I thought you should know better. That's typical of Audra. She's not a friend. A four word sentence that has sent the musical theater community online into chaos. He explains the two singers had some long ago rift and it can't have been that long ago because they were working closely together at one point and LuPone said as much, but she didn't want to elaborate then, really hitting below the belt when asked what she thought of McDonald's current production of Gypsy, of course playing at the Majestic Theater. She stared at me in silence for 15 seconds, then turned to the window and sighed. What a beautiful day. And in all of my years as a theatre critic, I have never been able to produce a review quite so damning. For what it's worth, the piece also finishes with an anecdote about Patty laughing out the side of her car window, about people sat by themselves in the park, calling them lonely as hell. And can you imagine, if you will, just for a moment, being sat in Central Park? Like perhaps you're on a lunch break from work, perhaps you're waiting to meet someone, just having a nice day by yourself, whatever it may be. And Patti LuPone laughs at you and yells at you out the side of the window of a passing car. That may be the most extraordinary detail of the entire thing. But I do think that amidst, you know, a lot of celebrated diva behavior and advocating for herself and a lot of delicious gossipy stories, this feels. Not like that. This feels uncomfortably personal and like there is clearly something else motivating all of this. Because in all of these statements that Patty has ever made, you know, she has so often been vindicated or she has been arguing for the right kind of things, and she has been arguing for better etiquette and better behavior and being more present. And that's not what this is. Because for her to take such issue with Audra's solidarity with Keisha feels an awful lot more like her having a strong personal, emotional response to the whole situation. Situation. And evidently it all goes back to this rift between Patty and Audra, going back several years. But I'm hard pressed to think of a single person in the Broadway theatre community who comes across as more kind and respected and level headed than Audra McDonald. And I wonder if that very characteristic is a part of why this is such a problem for Patty. Because she has spoken in this piece and in previous interviews about the perception of her as a diva and the way that her advocating for herself makes people think about her. And she's not necessarily receptive to that idea of her being a diva, whatever that may mean, whatever people think of the character of Patti LuPone. And yet, in spite of what she thinks of it, this has existed around her. This has been part of her aura for almost the entirety of her stage career. And Audra McDonald, meanwhile, is just this celebrated, prestigious actress, the likes of which I think Patty has always wanted to be regarded at. But Patty has never quite been able to push all the way way past musical theater and belting and the gypsy of it all. And it feels as though Audra is regarded by the community in a slightly different way. Patty has only ever won Tony Awards for musical theater roles, for a certain kind of a brash musical theater role, honestly. And listen, it doesn't surprise me that she has feelings about that production of Gypsy and even Audra's performance in Gypsy. And I've shared my own feelings about that on here as well. And I never saw Patti LuPone do it. But I also think it must be incredibly sad that these two were clearly friends at a time, and this is now where their relationship has arrived at. And I don't think any of this public mudslinging is really necessary. Everyone was very nervous when she was going to go and see Nicole in Sunset Boulevard. How thrilled were we all when she seemed so excited by the production and she was so welcoming of Nicole, who was being celebrated for playing Norma on Broadway. This thing that Patty never got to do, I thought she was going to chop off her head backstage and give it to the monkey. But no, she invited Nicole to her New Year's Eve party, and she has celebrated her, and there has been such warmth and kindness there. And then this happens. And now you kind of have to look back on it through the lens of her feud with Audrey and her resentment. Clearly, that is still very acutely felt. And you wonder if she is boosting Nicole, giving these public statements to try and prop up Nicole's Tony Awards mobility in spite of Audra McDonald. That may be a very frivolous detail for me to be pulling out of all of this, but it wouldn't totally surprise me, especially with the timing of this article. And I also think, you know what? It's incredibly high school to get mad at somebody for emojis. Like, we can talk about the fact that perhaps the social post may have been tantamount to an overreaction, but it's also, I think, fair enough for other people in the community, particularly other women of color in the community who would understand the place that Keisha is coming from to understand the roads that she has had to navigate in this industry. As a black woman, I think it's understandable for them to be able to show solidarity without that being perceived as a knife in the heart of Patti LuPone. It feels very high school to be like, well, you are friends with both of us, but if you're gonna like Keisha while Keisha and I are having an argument, then you can't be friends with me anymore. It's just silly. All of these women are too old and too accomplished to be behaving like this publicly. And by all these women, I mostly mean Patty. I don't really mean Keisha, and I definitely don't mean Audra because all that she has done is post some emojis on Instagram, for the love of God. Finally, on the topic of Patti LuPone potentially never going back to the stage and never going back to Broadway, I hope everyone saw her while they had the chance. But also, are there that many musical theatre roles, aside from those yet to be writt, that we desperately need to see Patty do? She'd be a great Madame Armfeld in Night Music at some point. Not just yet, but you know, her playing Rose in Gypsy felt like an inevitability of her Persona and her talent and her character. I don't know that there are that many more roles that are crying out for a Patti LuPone performance. And if there are, then there are plenty of other very talented actresses who could play those roles instead. Especially if Patty is going to damage her own reputation within the small Broadway community with public statements like this. I think it's really sad to see and you know, to have the feelings is one thing, but to speak about these actresses, to speak about these other women in the industry in the same article in which she talked about the challenges of being a woman in the industry, to say that about them, to call them names, it's not fun, delicious diva behavior, it's just disappointing. Those, anyway, have been my thoughts about this latest Broadway drama. As always, I would love to check in with what you all think. Let me know in the comments section below. Down below, what do we feel about this? Is there any aspect of this I haven't really talked about? Is there any side of this that I haven't necessarily considered? What nuance and insight can we bring to this until it's a thoroughly well understood issue and not just a little bit of Broadway drama? In any case, let us all strive to move through the world with kindness, with grace, and not to complain about our former colleagues over an artichoke. Thank you so much for watching or listening to this. I hope that you've enjoyed if you did, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube. For more things, subscribe theatre recaps, theatre reviews and theatre going vlogs or follow me on podcast platforms. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Minky Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.