Searching for Some Soul in ‘Matters of the Heart’

Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” kept coming to mind Friday night 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 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 show--a bare-stage cabaret-style presentation, was receiving its first outing. It looked it. And what soon became clear is the fact that “Matters of the Heart” is in need of the kind of creative rethinking and reworking that musical shows do as a matter of course before they venture into a Broadway opening.

LuPone’s brief commentary noted that what she had in mind was a presentation covering various aspects of love. Reasonable as the idea may have been as a starting point, it hardly seemed substantial enough to serve as the sole foundation for a structured show, since virtually every popular song deals with love in one way or another.

LuPone, however, had little more to say, devoting most of her time to singing a long sequence of tunes that only rarely--in a couple of medleys--had either dramatic flow or any special connection to one another.

Never identifying songwriters, even for the more obscure numbers, never bringing a sense of personal involvement to her interpretations, she seemed content to play the role of Broadway diva--not a wise choice in the more intimate surroundings of a cabaret setting. 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.

Dressed initially in a filmy white gown, LuPone changed into a somewhat more tailored white outfit for the second half of the evening. To her credit, her extensive career in musicals has endowed LuPone with the capacity to command a stage, even in a relatively stark setting, with no apparent choreography other than her elegant movements.

But the decision to free her to make those movements by apparently using a body microphone rather than a hand-held one simply detached her further from her listeners. The problem was further exacerbated by her tendency to swallow many of her words, often losing the impact of clever lyrics in songs such as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” and “When the World Was Young” (among many).

The combination of her distant-sounding voice, her failure to make much of an effort to interact with the capacity Cerritos audience, and the mechanical-sounding piano accompaniments (by a pianist unnamed in the program) resulted in a performance that failed to effectively display LuPone’s superb talents as a musical theater artist.

Not until she did an encore rendering of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” did those talents finally put in a full-blown appearance.