LuPone’s ‘Matters of the Heart’ Lacks Coherence at Cerritos

Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” kept coming to mind Friday during the debut of Patti LuPone’s one-woman theater piece, “Matters of the Heart,” at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts. Not because there was anything especially Pirandellian about LuPone’s appearance--far from it--but because a more accurate subtitle for her performance might have been “One Singer in Search of a Show.”

LuPone, the star of such hit musicals as “Evita,” “Les Miserables” and “Sunset Boulevard,” opened with the announcement that her program--a bare-stage, cabaret-style presentation she described as an examination of the various aspects of love--was receiving its first outing. It looked it. What soon became clear was that “Matters of the Heart” was in need of the kind of creative rethinking and reworking that musical shows do as a matter of course before they venture onto Broadway.

LuPone’s long sequence of tunes rarely revealed any special connection to each other. Never identifying songwriters, never bringing a sense of personal involvement to her interpretations, she seemed content to play the role of Broadway diva. If “Matters of the Heart” had any points to make, other than to serve as a showcase for LuPone’s often brassy-sounding voice, they didn’t come through.