Patti LuPone has, as Maria Callas would say, presence. Big presence. Draping her overtly emotional stage persona over the role of the opera legend in "Master Class," LuPone offers a more direct, outsize approach than the part's originator, Zoe Caldwell, squarely hitting the play's comedy if forsaking the brittle, off-handed arrogance that made Caldwell's performance so wonderfully insinuating. Where Caldwell sneaked up on each caustic note with a distracted nonchalance, LuPone goes for a head-on collision.
The attraction of "Master Class" is due in no small part to the theatrical melding of personalities onstage -- Caldwell and Callas, Callas and LuPone -- and the role's new owner puts her Look (another Callas requirement) all over Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play. The production should get steady box office mileage from the crowd-pleasing actress.
LuPone has the audience on her side and laughing almost immediately, delivering punch lines in her patented deadpan whine and grilling real-life late-comers just as the Callas character does in the script. At the reviewed performance, LuPone paused and glared as the tardy patrons slowly filed in, shouting "Bravo!" when they finally sat. Wild applause followed, LuPone's sassy performance off and running. (For the record, while LuPone is roughly the same age as Callas when the opera diva conducted the real master classes in the early 1970s that McNally takes off from in the play, it's either a compliment or a criticism to point out that LuPone seems a bit young for the role.)
A rare nonmusical stage performance for the actress, the role nonetheless allows for the larger-than-life emotionalism LuPone uses in her singing. Even critics of her songstyling should be won over by the approach here: The emoting seems entirely in keeping with La Divina, as when the character dramatically recites the translations of various operatic passages, or is visibly "devastated" by the beautiful singing of one student (still played with great charm by the original Jay Hunter Morris). "Never miss an opportunity to theatricalize," Callas tells her students, and LuPone listens.
The approach, though, is not without drawbacks. Caldwell's tempered pacing played beautifully to the play's grandest moment, when, just before intermission , Michael McGarty's austerely (and beautifully) designed classroom set is transformed, via light projections, into La Scala, with Callas movingly recalling her greatest triumph. Caldwell's Callas rose to the moment's high emotionalism; LuPone is already there, or nearly so.
But watch how LuPone's take-no-prisoners style benefits other passages. Tearfully recalling her cruel treatment at the hands of lover Aristotle Onassis, LuPone's Callas is brought back to the present as she listens to an aria being performed by a student. Technically adequate, the student's singing lacks the painfully brilliant passion that marked Callas' life and art. LuPone's heartsick reverie is very nearly a case study of the Callas approach, amply demonstrating the wide gulf between the rhapsodic and, as demonstrated by the student character, the merely serviceable.
Helen Goldsby replaces Audra McDonald as the student, and although she has a lovely voice and handles the pathos well, her streetwise approach to the comedy doesn't always suit the rarefied atmosphere of a master class. As another student, Theodora Fried is fine in the mostly comic smaller role, as is Gary Green as the accompanying pianist. Technically, "Master Class" remains first-class, thanks to the elegance of Brian MacDevitt's lighting and Jon Gottlieb's sound design (both crucial to the play's action).
Running time: 2 HOURS, 35 MIN.
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Date in print: Mon., Jul. 29, 1996