A Secondary Feud to The Patti LuPone Feud
Theater beef!
More from Hung Up this week: Patti LuPone Tells All … chats about the season finales of The Rehearsal, The Last of Us, and a chat tonight about what won’t be the season finale of the Knicks1 …
A great regret of my winter is that I never wrote at length about how greedy and self-involved season one of Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s TLC reality show was. I can’t believe they thought to film a reality show before a manslaughter trial, let alone that it was allowed. (“With Love, Meghan is no The Baldwins: The Hilaria-and-Alec Baldwin TLC reality show is a shameless freak show of one couple’s maladjustments that is transfixing in its utter weirdness,” I wrote in March. “Markle’s Netflix show, by contrast, is relentlessly cheery.”) But Alec Baldwin remains the source of some fascination to me … I mean, remember when his response to his wife’s non-Spanish heritage was an ominously self-taped side-eye and a warning to “consider the source?”
I read the New Yorker’s profile of Patti LuPone this week. In addition to all the normal things that caught my attention (LuPone not liking Jumbotrons because “don’t tell me how to feel”2 and LuPone looking out of the window instead of answering how she thought Audra McDonald plays Mama Rose in “Gypsy”) there was one loose end that I followed into another tab. Once upon a time (2013), Shia LaBeouf was tolerable and expected to make his Broadway debut in a play called “Orphans.” A short history, according to the Vulture headlines of that time: “Shia LaBeouf, Alec Baldwin to Star in Orphans on Broadway,” “Shia LaBeouf Won’t Be on Broadway After All,” “Shia LaBeouf Left Orphans Because of Beef With Alec Baldwin,” “Ben Foster to Replace Shia LaBeouf on Broadway,” “Shia LaBeouf Counters Alec Baldwin With Old E-mail Conversations,” “Shia LaBeouf Is Very Supportive of Orphans,”3 “Alec Baldwin Is Not Interested in Anything Shia LaBeouf Has to Say About Theater,”4 “Alec Baldwin-Starring Orphans Is Closing Early,” and finally: “Alec Baldwin Sure Does Hate Ben Brantley.”
There is more talk about orphans here than in A Series of Unfortunate Events.
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