Well, it took less than a week for Audra McDonald to respond to Patti LuPone’s New Yorker interview laden with micro-aggressions (or maximum-aggressions), and it’s better than I ever anticipated. On Thursday, CBS Sunday Morning posted a clip on Instagram in which McDonald addressed LuPone’s remark that she “wasn’t a friend.”
“If there’s a rift between us, I don’t know what it is,” McDonald said, when Gayle King asked the seven-time Tony winner how she felt about LuPone’s hostility. “That’s something you’d have to ask Patti about. You know, I haven’t seen her in about 11 years, just because we’ve been busy, just with life. So I don’t know what rift she’s talking about, but you’d have to ask her.” I’m sorry but, “you’d have to ask her” is right on par with “I don’t know her” in the iconic response category.
Now, 11 years is specific. So, I went ahead and traveled back to 2014 only to discover that it just happened to be the year McDonald won her sixth Tony Award. She broke a record for winning the most acting performance Tony Awards and became the first performer to win in all performance categories. What a coincidence that LuPone hasn’t seen her ever since…
In case you missed the New Yorker interview, LuPone was asked about her issue with Kecia Lewis, another Black veteran of Broadway (see a pattern here?), and McDonald’s support for her. “That’s typical of Audra,” Lupone said. “She’s not a friend.” Then, when asked about McDonald’s critically-acclaimed performance in Gypsy, the journalist wrote that LuPone “stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, ‘What a beautiful day.’”
LuPone’s abhorrent behavior arrived as something of a shock considering she’s co-starred alongside McDonald in a number of productions like Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and the New York Philharmonic’s concert version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and they seemed like something akin to friends before. Apparently, the pair had a feud that LuPone told the publication she didn’t wish to elaborate on. She also didn’t wish to speak about the possibility of McDonald taking home a seventh Tony award in June.
The CBS Mornings interview with King is set to air in full next week. Until then, I will be studying how very unfazed McDonald is in the only available clip. Frankly, even if she doesn’t win the Tony, she should be given all the flowers for her class in the face of LuPone’s crassness.
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