Broadway's Patti LuPone blazes her way back to Austin

More than a bit of Broadway glamour will light up the Long Center stage as star Patti LuPone brings her "Don't Monkey with Broadway" tour to Austin on May 1.

She is slated to sing classics and off-beat songs from Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jule Styne, Stephen Schwartz, Charles Strouse, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.

Although LuPone won her first Tony Award nomination for "The Robber Bridegroom" in 1974, she made her first indelible mark on Broadway musicals with the title role in "Evita" in 1979.

While she blazed a trail through non-musicals, TV and film, she is best known for her outsized performances in musicals such as "Les Misérables," "Anything Goes" "Company," "Sunset Boulevard," "Pal Joey," "Sweeney Todd" and "Gypsy" in New York, London and elsewhere.

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LuPone has won three Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards and two Grammys. She has performed several times in concert in Austin at the Paramount Theatre and Long Center. The only other scheduled Texas stop on this year's tour is Dallas for a Turtle Creek Chorale gala.

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LuPone has made a side act of tangling with audience members, stopping shows to protest people using cell phones, taking flash pictures, talking or wearing facemasks incorrectly in recent years.

"Where's the elegance?" she asked in a blog post. "I mean, I'm glad they show up because God knows it's a dying art form and I guess I'm glad they're all comfortable, sleeping, eating and drinking, things they should be doing at home and in a restaurant. But it's just not done in the theater or shouldn't be."

In 2022, LuPone announced that she was resigning from the Actors Equity theatrical union after five decades, which effectively meant stepping away from Broadway at least temporarily. A lack of union membership does not affect her ability to perform at concerts.

Advance publicity for the Long Center concert promises that LuPone will share with the audience, "how her life-long love affair with Broadway began and her concern for what the Great White Way is becoming today."

Patti LuPone in Austin

When: 8 p.m. May 1

Where: Long Center for the Performing Arts, 701 W. Riverside Drive

Cost: $39-$129

Info: thelongcenter.org; 512-474-5664

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Broadway icon Patti LuPone returns to Austin: How to get tickets