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Patti LuPone lights up the cabaret scene

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP

NEW YORK, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- Evergreen actress-singer Patti LuPone has brought the second edition of her "The Lady With the Torch" night club act to Feinstein's at the Regency, illuminating the cabaret scene with all the panache and vocal grandeur of a latter-day Edith Piaf.

Indeed, LuPone tells her audience early on in the show that Piaf, the little French sparrow of happy memory, is "my all-time favorite singer." And although they are not alike physically, there is a resemblance in their forthright style and piquant delivery of material that is both savage and sultry.

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LuPone returned to the club scene this year after a trans-Atlantic career as the star of the musical stage that took off in 1979 with her now legendary performance in the title role of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Evita." She retired from cabaret after "Evita" and stayed away for 25 years.

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Fresh from sold-out engagements of "The Lady With the Torch" in Los Angeles and San Francisco and a concert production of Leonard Bernstein's "Candide" with the New York Philharmonic, LuPone is premiering "The Lady With the Torch II" at Feinstein's through Nov. 20.

Too hot to cool down, LuPone will immediately begin to prepare for the title role in a revival of Marc Blitzstein's "Regina" at the Kennedy Center in Washington in February. Based on Lillian Hellman's play, "The Little Foxes," the musical offers her a more mature role than she usually plays, although she was the aging film star Norma Desmond in a London production of "Sunset Boulevard" 10 years ago.

LuPone, wearing a sexy red satin jacket over black pants, leads off her act with a provocative rendering of Willie Nelson's "Nightlife" followed by an enchantingly playful "Me and My Shadow," the Billy Rose-Al Jolson classic. Always one to come up with a few musical surprises, she launches into Cole Porter's little known and delightfully suggestive "Find Me a Primitive Man."

Although famous for her stentorian soprano, LuPone keeps a lid on volume in the not overly large Feinstein's throughout her program of mostly torch songs, defined by Webster's as plaintive popular ballads expressing unhappiness in love. But on occasion she reveals the tiger in her voice to thrilling effect.

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Nothing suits the definition of torch song better than Gus Kahn's "I'm Through With Love," which is truly the show's anthem and a chance for LuPone's superb accompanist, Chris Fenwick, to show what he can do at the piano keyboard. It is a nice contrast to its preceding number, Tom Adair's "Everything Happens to Me," a charming little comic novelty.

LuPone is at her smoldering best singing Cole Porter's "So in Love" and Johnny Mercer's "I Wanna Be Around" and has fun matching up Gus Kahn's "Miss Lonely Hearts" and "My Buddy," a timely war song. But for pure enchantment, there's no topping her interpretation of three songs associated with Piaf -- "I Regret Everything," "I Love Paris" and "C'est Magnifique," the latter sung intimately while squeezing a man at a ringside table to the audience's delight.

She brings the show to a riotous close with Edward Heyman's "Body and Soul" and for an encore belts out "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime," cleverly getting a real blast out of a song that was born in the Great Depression. In program selections such as these, one detects the fine hand of Scott Wittman, who conceives and directs LuPone's cabaret shows.

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