Doug<\/a> asked if I’d ever thought about blogging, for example, I asked each client and their managers for permission; if one of them had said no, I wouldn’t have done it. <\/p>\nThere are less obvious things, however, that result in bad artist PR. Artists can be busy, tired, and sometimes just plain bizarre and obnoxious (as can the rest of us), but it’s an artist’s team’s job to absorb those things and present a calmer, more grounded front to outside parties. Why do I know that Kathleen Battle story? Because it’s archetypal diva behavior that screams “tell me!”, and about ten different people have. But that was a conversation between her and the people who work for her, so no matter how ridiculous, it wasn’t intended for public consumption. Keep it under wraps. <\/p>\n
Managers who walk on eggshells around their clients and expect the rest
\nof the known-universe to do the same are also guilty in their own way: the artist is actually not as “something” as the team has made him or her seem. I’ll work with the front-people and then finally meet the ” ” artist we were all so concerned about, and he or she will be great. Through overt efforts to shield artists from bad PR, we are sometimes generating it on other levels.<\/p>\n
Artists do, of course, share some of the responsibility. We had a day of interviews planned with The King’s Singers in early December, and I met them at their hotel in the morning. I showed up and there they were, all six, bundled up and ready to go. They had flown overnight to get to New York, and I had visions of at least part of the group dragging a little. “I’m so impressed you’re all here,” I said. “We’re British!” the bass Stephen Connolly replied. It seems trivial and obvious, but knowing that your clients will get to interviews when and where they’re scheduled is important: I work hard to set up interviews, so to have an artist just not show, or be forty-odd minutes late, would be crushing. I’m also fortunate that not only do they show up on time, but at the interviews my clients are all articulate, intelligent and charismatic. I cannot imagine having to babysit a client during an interview for fear of what they would say. I tag along to interviews sometimes for logistical reasons, but I would never sit in the room or interfere. <\/p>\n
All the retainer money and prestige in the world could not convince me to work for an artist who publicly misbehaved. That, I would not be able to absorb and re-present to the world-at-large. On Saturday night, my friend Maureen and I braved the snow and went to Gypsy <\/i>on Broadway.<\/i> PATTI LUPONE GYPSY<\/i>, as I believed it was actually billed. <\/i>Maureen had never seen a production of the musical and was especially excited to be at the last Saturday night performance of the run. “She’s really gonna give it her all,” we both smiled smugly, and when Lupone entered there was a full three minutes of applause. I had seen the same production at City Center, and knew she was about to earn all the preemptive clapping the crowd wanted to give her. <\/p>\n
She was pretty hoarse the whole time – I also saw Caroline, or Change<\/i> near the end of its run, and I remember the same thing happening to Tonya Pinkins. It was fine, though, since Patti Lupone hoarse is still a more powerful voice than most. And the whole cast was clearly having fun. So all was better-than-well until we got to the two hour and thirty minute mark, Mama Rose on stage by herself, having a breakdown. We earned it, let’s bring it home. <\/p>\n
“Here she is, boys! Here she is, world! Here’s Roooose!” <\/p>\n
“Curtain up…light the lights…”<\/p>\n
“No. Enough. ENOUGH. Stop. Stop. You have taken three pictures. You in
\nthe third row from the back. Didn’t you hear the announcement? They
\nsaid no pictures in the announcement! Three pictures. I won’t have it.
\nI want him out of here.”<\/p>\n
Patti Lupone, not Mama Rose, shouting at an audience member, at the most – some might say only – important part of the entire musical. What followed was a ten minute lecture on our contemporary society’s “lack of public manners”. “This is the the-atre!” she exclaimed as if this were a Saturday Night Live skit about a Broadway diva. “I won’t go on while he’s still in this theatre.” “Turn on the house lights, I must see that he’s gone.” “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE.” “I simply won’t go on.” Screaming. Storming around the stage. Screaming and storming, the hoarse Broadway diva playing Mama Rose on the last evening show of the run, Patti Lupone: a clich\u00e9 within a clich\u00e9. <\/p>\n
Yes, it’s rude – illegal, even – to take photographs at a Broadway show, but Lupone knows the drill at this point in her career. Pull yourself together. Have some degree of respect for your fellow cast members, orchestra members, audience members. Tell someone backstage that you won’t go on for the scene unless the person is taken out of the theater. Simply walking off stage would have been better. Breaking character like that? Yelling<\/i> at us? Ready or not, here comes Patti. <\/p>\n
It seems my friend and I were in the minority in our disbelief and disappointment. The audience went absolutely nuts when she broke character. I thought the dancer boy in front of us was going to pass out from the thrill of it all. Why? Because Lupone was in the right? Of course not. The audience loved it because now they can go back to NYU or New Jersey or Minnesota and tell their very own, first-person, crazy Patti Lupone story. For most, that PR disaster was worth the price of admission. <\/p>\n
Me? I want my money back, and from here on out will believe she’s earned all the bad diva press she gets. <\/p>\n
Update 1\/16 2:30pm: It’s “LuPone” not “Lupone”. Please don’t eat\/kill me, Patti. <\/i><\/p>\n
Update 1\/19 11:58am: My sister has found a recording of the incident<\/a>. The quality is quite good. Apparently, Ms. LuPone had bigger things to worry about than someone taking photographs. <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Have you heard the one about Kathleen Battle? The one where she’s in the back seat of a town car and calls her manager’s office? You know, the one where she says, “Can you tell this driver to turn the air down?” ______ It takes a village, as they say, to manage an artist’s public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-169","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/lifesapitch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}