'What's the Rift?' Wonders Audra McDonald. 'Ask Patti!'

Someone at the Tonys should see if a truce can be made between Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald and see if the Broadway superstars could open the upcoming telecast on June 6 with "Bosom Buddies." Or, if not that, then the more acerbic "There's Always a Woman," which the two had previously performed at Chicago's Ravinia Festival in 2008 in a revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Anyone Can Whistle."

Fortunately, the number was captured on video.

But such a scenario is unlikely. It is doubtful that the two will reconcile their differences any time soon, especially since McDonald said today that she has no idea what's behind LuPone's comment in Michael Schulman's recent New Yorker profile that the pair, who have performed numerous times over the years, that Audra is "'not a friend – hard 'D.'"

When asked about the comment on CBS This Morning by Gayle King, BroadwayWorld reports, McDonald responded: "If there's a rift between us, I don't know what it is. That's something that you'd have to ask Patti about. I haven't seen her in about 11 years – just because we've been busy with life and stuff. So I don't know what rift she's talking about. But, you'd have to ask her..."

The CBS Mornings and CBS Sunday Mornings Instagram page reports "that the interview was scheduled before actor Patti LuPone made headlines in a New Yorker article where she made eyebrow-raising comments about fellow Broadway stars, including McDonald." The full interview is not to be aired until next week. CBS is broadcasting the Tony Awards.

The reason for the interview is McDonald's star turn in the current revival of "Gypsy," for which she is up for her seventh Tony Award. If she wins, she will be the most honored actor in Tony history. But the competition this year is the most competitive in the history of the awards, or at least since Barbra Streisand went up against Carol Channing in 1965. (Channing won.) Seen as McDonald's biggest rival is Nicole Scherzinger for her Norma Desmond in the revival of "Sunset Boulevard." On the Awards site Gold Derby, both Scherzinger and "Sunset Blvd." (as the show has been rebranded) hold a slight edge in the odds, but it is difficult to determine whether the LuPone snafu will affect the voting. LuPone won the Tony for the last "Gypsy" revival in 2008, her second win for Best Actress in a Musical after winning in 1980 for "Evita." She also won for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for "Company" in 2022.

In the New Yorker, Michael Schulman wrote, "When I asked what she had thought of McDonald's current production of "Gypsy," she stared at me, in silence, for fifteen seconds. Then she turned to the window and sighed, "What a beautiful day."

The comment followed LuPone's comment that McDonald "should have known better" than to have dropped positive emojis in an Instagram post by another Tony-winning actress, Kecia Lewis, over an issue of sound leaking through the walls of two Broadway theaters last fall. In one was LuPone, who was starring with Mia Farrow in a production of "The Roommate." In the other was Lewis and the cast of the hit Alicia Keys musical "Hell's Kitchen," which had sound cues that were too loud for LuPone. Schulman reported the controversy this way: "At her stage manager's suggestion, LuPone called Robert Wankel, the head of the Shubert Organization, and asked him if he could fix the noise problem. Once it was taken care of, she sent thank-you flowers to the musical's crew. She was surprised, then, when Kecia Lewis, an actress in 'Hell's Kitchen,' posted a video on Instagram, speaking as one 'veteran' to another, and called LuPone's actions 'bullying,' 'racially microaggressive,' and 'rooted in privilege,' because she had labelled 'a Black show loud.'"

In response, McDonald dropped supportive emojis in Lewis's post. Asked by Schulman about the emojis, LuPone said: "And I thought, You should know better. That's typical of Audra. She's not a friend."

Since the New Yorker profile was published earlier this week, every inch of it has been scoured by the press, which pulled out every negative comment LuPone has made about other show business personalities. And there were many. "He looked like Pinocchio to me," she said of ex-boyfriend Kevin Kline; she claimed director Harold Prince tormented her during "Evita"; she called Bill Smitrovich, her co-star on the ABC show "Life Goes On," a "thoroughly distasteful man"; she accused Glen Close of orchestrating a seat next to her at a Kennedy Center tribute to Barbara Cook ("I wanted to go, 'Bullshit, bitch!'"); she called Madonna "a movie killer"; and, not surprisingly, she went after Donald Trump ("I hate the motherfucker").

LuPone even targets the Kennedy Center. "She told me, more than once, that the Trumpified Kennedy Center "should get blown up," writes Schulman, which has sparked the ire of Richard Grenell, the Trump-appointed head of the complex.

Grenell told Newsmax that LuPone was giving "aid and comfort to the crazies" with her comment. "We should have every Democrat, every left-leaning person condemning what she said," Grenell stated. "Do I actually believe Patti LuPone is going to build a bomb and throw it inside the Kennedy Center? No, I don't believe that. However, she is giving aid and comfort to the crazies."

But what has gotten the biggest backlash is her comments on Lewis, who won her Tony Award last year in the Supporting Actress in a Musical category – the one that LuPone won the year before for "Company." From the New Yorker: "'Oh, my God,' LuPone said, balking, when I brought up the incident. 'Here's the problem. She calls herself a veteran? Let's find out how many Broadway shows Kecia Lewis has done, because she doesn't know what the fuck she's talking about.' She Googled. 'She's done seven. I've done thirty-one. Don't call yourself a vet, bitch.' (The correct numbers are actually ten and twenty-eight, but who's counting?) She explained, of the noise problem, 'This is not unusual on Broadway. This happens all the time when walls are shared.'"

Black Broadway creatives have come down hard on LuPone. Representative of the commentary is that of actor and playwright Douglas Lyons, whose comments are above.