No fans of musical theatre could stay away from this one night performance by Patti LuPone. There’s support from accompanist Joseph Thalken and from the local Griffin Music Ensemble but no support act, just two hours of a masterly demonstration of how singing and acting connect. And how to work an audience.

LuPone has a long history in the Broadway musical and this show is largely about her life in theatre and some of her insights into the nature of the beast. The evening becomes a history of post World War II music theatre and an education in how to do it as she gives her own regards to an ever-changing Broadway.

She sometimes ignores gender to sing the songs she wants to, instead of only the songs that traditionally fit. Professor Harold Hill’s fast talking Ya Got Trouble from Music Man wonderfully enlists the Griffin Music Ensemble as the persuadable citizens of River City. Who wouldn’t want to sing Guys and Dolls’ Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat? And there’s a soaring Something’s Coming from West Side Story.

She goes for the songs she likes. She goes for the songs that need rescue from years of sentiment, like Happy Talk from South Pacific where Bloody Mary dresses up the prostitution of her daughter Liat to Lieutenant Joe Cable in romantic dreams. She makes Oklahoma’s Ado Annie honest rather than coy in I Cain’t Say No. Sweet Charity’s Hey Big Spender gets the most dry and deadpan and despairing rendition I think I’ve ever seen.

Hair is touched upon with a wistfulness for the 1960s. Sondheim’s The Ladies Who Lunch drips with ironic social criticism as, in a different way, does Millworker from the musical Working, based on the interviews by Studs Terkel chronicling the difficult lives of American workers. She sings both sides in a comic take on of West Side Story’s savage duet A Boy Like That and Mrs Lovett and the boy Tobias Ragg in the sinister Not While I’m Around. And does a cold, manipulative Evita in Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina.

Thalken at the piano is unobtrusive but deeply skilled, occasionally adding in a quiet singing voice.
A slight mike glitch at the beginning of the show elides into a demonstration of good old-fashioned voice projection. Then the encores skilfully backed by the Griffin Music Ensemble slide into work without mikes and you remember how ubiquitous they have become. And how unnecessary with a voice like LuPone’s and her capacity to communicate a number.

Red roses on a grand piano, the rapt faces of the Griffin Music Ensemble (who seemed hardly to believe their luck) and the unsurpassable presence of Patti LuPone. What an evening.