Kad said: "
Well, it doesn't take a leap to assume Prince didn't care much for her, either. After all, in his memoir, he lavishes praise on Elaine Paige and Mandy Patinkin... while the only thing he says about her is that she played Eva on Broadway."
As I've said in other threads, my now-husband/then-partner went to work as Prince's assistant casting director, a year or two after LuPone left EVITA. The stories he encountered about her were universally negative. Now perhaps that attitude flowed down from the boss; I can't say. But she was considered difficult for all sorts of reasons, something that to my knowledge was never true of the later Evas.
None of this affects my appreciation for LuPone's voice and her work. I think she is a fine actress with a lovely singing voice. (The well was poisoned for my husband, however; he can barely abide her.)
BTW, through my husband, I stage managed a lot of auditions for the Prince office and witnessed many women audition for the lead role in EVITA. It was my impression that they WANTED somebody who would struggle a little with the high notes. (I had one close friend who easily belted the High Gs and As the role demands, with nary a break on the way up. She was invited to audition many times over the years, but was never hired; she later made a brilliant and thrilling Eva out of town.)
I didn't really understand why at the time, but in a class on the history of opera a few years later the professor was talking about the problem with Yma Sumac in AIDA, etc. He said you knew she could sing much higher than the role required, so much of the drama of "will she or won't she make the high note" was lost, to the detriment of the opera itself.
It was then I understood that they wanted the tension in Eva's high notes. It wasn't a matter of anybody hating women.
