AwardsTony Winners Ben Platt and Patti LuPone Salute Broadway at the 2018 Grammy AwardsPlatt earned a Grammy earlier in the day for the Dear Evan Hansen cast recording.
By
Ryan McPhee
January 28, 2018
Ben Platt and Patti LuPone at the 2018 Grammy Awards
The 60th Annual Grammy Awards—the first to take place in New York since 2003—paid tribute to Broadway with performances from Tony and Grammy winners Ben Platt and Patti LuPone.
“We can’t celebrate music in New York without honoring the legacy of Broadway,” Tony-winning host James Corden said as he introduced the two performers.
Patti LuPone at the 2018 Grammy Awards
Platt sang West Side Story’s “Somewhere,” honoring Leonard Bernstein as part of a worldwide celebration of the composer’s centennial, in an acoustic guitar-cello arrangement. Platt interpolated some of his signature runs and riffs into the Bernstein melody, earning a standing ovation from the crowd.
The performance followed a Grammy win for Platt earlier in the day as the Dear Evan Hansen Original Broadway Cast Recording won the award for Best Musical Theater Album. (LuPone earned two Grammy Awards in 2008 for the recording of L.A. Opera’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.)
LuPone, introduced by Corden as “true Broadway royalty…get ready to clutch your pearls,” offered a rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” from Evita (for which she won her first Tony in 1980) as composer Andrew Lloyd Webber approaches his 70th birthday.
She first brought the Evita showstopper at the awards ceremony in 1981. Nearly 40 years later, LuPone returned to the Grammys stage to sing the song in its original key with an orchestra and on a balcony mimicking the famed Casa Rosada set, earning applause as she raised her arms to the number’s iconic final pose.
Her performance this year marked what she has reportedly referred to as a “détente” between her and Lloyd Webber, following a decades-long period of tension after she was dismissed from the Broadway transfer of Sunset Boulevard. LuPone discussed the incident and its aftermath in her 2010 memoir.
While the Grammys just returned to New York after 15 years, Lloyd Webber recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of a New York mainstay: the Broadway production of The Phantom of the Opera. Take a look at gala festivities below.
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The Fred Ebb Award recognizes excellence in musical theatre songwriting, by a songwriter or songwriting team that has not yet achieved significant commercial success.
