Patti LuPone
‘A Life In Notes’
Touring Through May

The singer and actress Patti LuPone is officially celebrating her 75th birthday with a concert tour for a new show she has titled “A Life In Notes.” She launched it in Texas late last month, and since then has played through Boston and Stony Brook, New York, before bringing it to Carnegie Hall earlier this week. She returns to the East Coast in a few weeks with performances at Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Connecticut. 

With a title like that, I think we in the audience expected a straightforward retrospective of a great diva’s life and work, the kind that name-above-the-title leading ladies use to talk about their great roles, their great shows, their great songs, and the ones that got away. “A Life In Notes,” written from Ms. LuPone’s experiences by Jeffrey Richman, “conceived and directed” by Scott Wittman, and with Joseph Thalken as pianist musical director, was both that … and not that.

The first half, which found Ms. LuPone taking the stage in an understated, dark pantsuit, was ostensibly about her childhood in Long Island and early experiences in theater. That was the subject of her narration, but the songs were an extended meditation on the pop music of the 1950s and ’60s, using Leon Russell’s “A Song For You” as a prelude but starting the chronology, as it were, with Rosemary Clooney’s 1951 “Come on-a My House.”  

Only relatively few numbers, such as “Some People” from “Gypsy,” were show tunes from Ms. LuPone’s major roles; most were simply period pop hits that meant a great deal to her personally more than professionally. 

She leaned into so-called teen angst ballads, like “Town Without Pity” and “Teen Angel.” She gave us a reading of “We Kiss in a Shadow” from “The King and I,” but, surprisingly it was the 1965 doo-wop arrangement by the Luvs.  

Along the way, Ms. LuPone treated us to some songs that reflected on the period in a more profound way, like Marc Blitzstein’s “I Wish It So,” Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” and Kate McGarrigle’s “Saratoga Summer Song,” all of which are essentially coming-of-age type stories told in song form. She concluded the first half with “Those Were the Days,” the 1968 pop hit inspired by a traditional Russian Gypsy song, which she turned into an aria of bittersweet reflection, albeit a rousing one.

For the second act, Ms. LuPone strutted out in an eye-catching gold, sequined gown, as befits a larger-than-life diva. Despite the costume change, she was still in a Brill Building mood, singing the Drifters’ “On Broadway.” When she quickly launched into “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from “Evita,” “I Dreamed a Dream” from “Les Miserables,” and then “Ladies Who Lunch” from “Company,” we grew increasingly conditioned to expect that Act II would become the greatest-hit retrospective that we were expecting, but she continued to surprise us.

There was time, for instance, for a mashup of two very different songs about time, Rodgers & Hart’s “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” And then we were ready for “Ready to Begin Again” a poignant song written for Peggy Lee in a deceptively psychedelic vaudeville style, and singer-songwriter material like Janis Ian’s “Stars.”

Somehow, Bob Dylan walked off with the second half: following “Make You Feel My Love,” she climaxed the evening with “Forever Young.” It was an appropriately theatrical song — I’ve always thought of it as Mr. Dylan’s answer to “More I Can Not Wish You” from “Guys and Dolls” — that she made into something considerably more epic by bringing out the New York City Youth Chorus and the singer-actress-performance artist Bridgett Everett.  

It takes a confident and secure artist like Ms. LuPone to be unafraid of literally being overshadowed by 40 adorable tweens as well as the titanically tonsilled Ms. Everett — a colossal talent as well as a colossal figure of a woman in ultra-high heels and yards of pink tulle. It was quite a moment, but Ms. LuPone and Mr. Thalken were well aware it wasn’t a suitable ending, so they closed more intimately with John Lennon’s “In My Life” — and then back into a brief encore of “Those Were The Days.”

The “Notes of a Life” concert tour is a fitting one for an artist turning 75 — if you can believe it.  I wasn’t the only one in the house who’d been following her for the last 40 years, ever since about 1981, when I saw one of her earliest “solo” shows, which she called “The Argentina Turner Revue,” at the old Bottom Line, and in the 1983 off-Broadway revival of “The Cradle Will Rock.”  

The ending was sweetly nostalgic, but it didn’t have to be; Patti LuPone both sings and looks better than ever. Her best of times is now.