Patti LuPone's Lloyd Webber Feud Is Thirty Years Old and Still Breathing

The Patti LuPone and Andrew Lloyd Webber situation has become something between a feud and a mythology, which is to say it has outlived its original drama and become a story the industry tells about itself. LuPone was fired from the Los Angeles production of Sunset Boulevard in 1994, replaced by Glenn Close before the show ever reached New York, and has been publicly, specifically, and entertainingly unforgiving about it ever since. Three decades later, the community is still talking about it, which raises a genuinely interesting question about what this particular grudge has come to represent.