Broadway Is Not Happy with Patti LuPone
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 28, 2025
Header Image Source: Michael Loccisano via Getty Images
Patti LuPone is known for many things: winning three Tony awards, headlining numerous Broadway hits, cameoing on Will & Grace, being a witch on Agatha All Along. Mostly, though, she’s infamous for her scathing comments about, well, everyone. She’s got a quip for every person who has even vaguely slighted her, from Andrew Lloyd Webber to Donald Trump to people using their phones in theatres. It’s made her beloved to many a lover of an old-school diva. It’s also gotten her into a lot of trouble, as you can imagine. This latest incident has seen her receive more backlash than I imagine she had expected.
In an interview with The New Yorker, LuPone worked overtime to give the readers the juicy shade she’s infamous for. Writer Michael Shulman notes that LuPone’s ‘bluntness has made her a kind of urban folk hero.’ We do love a sharp-witted singer with an incredible belt who fires off one-liners like Bette Davis. And in this piece, she knows what the people want.
Shulman asks her about an incident involving Kecia Lewis, a fellow Broadway star with whom she shared an altercation of sorts. While LuPone was starring in the play The Roommate, she complained about the noise coming from the show next door, the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen. To quote the piece:
At her stage manager’s suggestion, LuPone called Robert Wankel, the head of the Shubert 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 Kecia Lewis, an actress in “Hell’s Kitchen,” posted a video on Instagram, speaking as one “veteran” to another, and called LuPone’s actions “bullying,” “racially microaggressive,” and “rooted in privilege,” because she had labelled “a Black show loud.”“Oh, my God,” LuPone said, balking, when I brought up the incident. “Here’s the problem. She calls herself a veteran? Let’s find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s talking about.” She Googled. “She’s done seven. I’ve done thirty-one. Don’t call yourself a vet, bitch.” (The correct numbers are actually ten and twenty-eight, but who’s counting?) She explained, of the noise problem, “This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared.”
Referring to an industry contemporary as a ‘b*tch’, even in the sassy diva way, is seldom a good look. Nor is denigrating a fellow long-time stage star by claiming they’re not a real veteran because they’ve ‘only’ done ten shows. In Broadway, that’s a highly impressive number. This moment alone probably would have been enough to get LuPone in trouble with her Broadway community, but then she came for Audra McDonald, a six-time Tony winner (featured in The Hottest Image Ever) who is universally beloved.
I mentioned that Audra McDonald—the Tony-decorated Broadway star—had given the video supportive emojis. “Exactly,” LuPone said. “And I thought, You should know better. That’s typical of Audra. She’s not a friend”—hard “D.” The two singers had some long-ago rift, LuPone said, but she didn’t want to elaborate. When I asked what she had thought of McDonald’s current production of “Gypsy,” she stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, “What a beautiful day.”
Hmmm…
Okay, let’s be honest here. You hear that LuPone and McDonald fell out, and your first thought is, ‘I bet it was Patti’s fault.’ Whatever happened in private between these two — and certainly, McDonald has never said anything about it — it’s certainly a Capital-C Choice to turn it into your latest catty one-liner, and to put on a big show for a writer at The New Yorker. It makes for great copy, but this isn’t like her calling Trump an ‘asshole’ or her beef wth Lord Andy of Cats. This is Audra! It’s like saying you tripped over Mister Rogers in the hallway.
The obvious microaggressions toward two Black women are hard to ignore here. Lewis felt disrespected by LuPone and LuPone just gave her a bunch of reasons to confirm that her responses were valid. And Audra is just living her life, man. If the best diva antics work because they punch up then this fails because nobody wants to beef with Audra. She’s never given anyone a reason to.
I wonder if LuPone expected everyone to ‘yaas queen’ in response to this piece. The way she delivered that response to the question about McDonald in Gypsy feels like she was putting on a show to be made into a gif. What actually happened was that the Broadway world rallied around both Lewis and McDonald.
Dear Patti Lupone,
— Douglas Lyons (@DouglasSings) May 27, 2025
31 shows doth not equal class. #broadway pic.twitter.com/e6UYsA2VQ4
Patti LuPone has always been a “diva” and most of the time it’s applauded and encouraged. But when the ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ incident happened, I knew she was showing her true colors. And now with this New Yorker article, she has proven to be a bitter person that has done no work to dismantle her racism.
— JenJen (@diflaversham.bsky.social) May 28, 2025 at 3:19 AM
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Sometimes, you just diva too close to the sun. Anyway, I don’t think being an arrogant jackass who’s desperate to be memed is quite diva material. One needs to be more unbothered to pull that off. See Exhibit A below.
Time Magazine would drop its latest (gorgeous) cover featuring Audra and dubbing her "Broadway's Greatest" today.
— Kevin Daly (@kevinddaly.bsky.social) May 27, 2025 at 1:41 AM
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