PATTI LuPONE
For the first time since they took Broadway by storm in the original New York production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Evita, Tony winners Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin are sharing a Broadway stage in An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, which officially opened Nov. 21 to rave reviews at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. And, not since Mary Martin and Ethel Merman famously plopped themselves down on two chairs for a 1953 TV special and dove into a 13-minute duet featuring the songs that made them famous have two musical theatre stars so radically reinterpreted what a concert evening could be — and what two artists could do with two chairs (witness their charming, humorous Act One finale).

Both LuPone and Patinkin are in terrific voice. In a two-act, two-hour show that flies by on a cloud of music, both artists reconfirm their places as two of the most exciting musical theatre stars of their generation. To watch either of these two performers interpret a song is a thrill, but seeing them together on stage three decades after their Tony-winning work in Evita adds another layer of emotional poignancy.

"It's a history of a friendship," Olivier Award winner LuPone told me the morning of her latest Broadway opening. "When I watch him do 'Oh What a Circus,' I'm not nostalgic for Evita in the respect that I would love to play it again, but when I watch him do 'Oh What a Circus' on Broadway, I wish I could go back just one more time, in that production, with that company, and that orchestra, on that stage, in those costumes and lights, and that set, and do it one more time."