ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Wednesday, January 10, 1996            TAG: 9601100100
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: A-2  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: NEW YORK 
SOURCE: MARY CAMPBELL ASSOCIATED PRESS 

LUPONE HAPPY TO HAVE A PART IN RADIO ON TV

Singer-actress Patti LuPone is such a fan of radio, author-composer Rupert Holmes and American Movie Classics that she accepted a guest part in AMC's ``Remember WENN'' series without reading the script.

``TV doing radio?'' she exclaims. ``It's brilliant.''

``Remember WENN,'' which premieres Saturday, is a 10-part series about a fictional Pittsburgh radio station set in 1939, the first series American Movie Classics has produced that doesn't fall into the documentary or news categories. The cable network principally airs what its name indicates.

``I remember in the morning on Long Island, my mother used to listen to `The Breakfast Club,''' LuPone says. ``We listened to the radio all the time. I remember hearing Arthur Godfrey and Kate Smith. My first experience with theater of any kind was singing back at the radio at a very, very young age. I'm 46 now.''

As she gets her hair marcelled and makeup and nails done to turn her into ``1930s international stage and screen star Grace Cavendish,'' LuPone explains her part.

``Grace is going around the country to radio stations to broadcast for help for refugees in Europe,'' she says. ``She makes a stop at WENN in Pittsburgh, where she knows a few people.''

Among them is Mr. Eldridge (actor George Hall), the station's editorial supervisor, who invented the pneumatic trap door. She once worked for him as a gofer. Later, he was the stage-door man when Grace and Hilary Booth (played by Melinda Mullins), now the reigning star of WENN, were both acting in ``The Rivals'' on Broadway.

``Grace is a regular person. She is painted by Hilary to be poison,'' LuPone says.

As the cast acts the scenes of the fourth episode, the actors' voices are arch and fraught with dramatic tension, underscored by an off-stage organ.

Small rooms have been partitioned into sets in a warehouse in Queens for the shooting. There's the radio station's reception area, with old-time switchboard; the writers' room, with ancient upright typewriters; and a room with the radio microphones and a table full of props for the sound-effects man (Tom Beckett).

``Remember WENN'' was shot on film, which was manipulated to make it look like the Technicolor used in movies of the time.

LuPone is a big fan of those old films.

``I used to cut school and go to movies,'' she says. ``Some of the things that were on when I was growing up, I didn't see again until America Movie Classics started to show them again. I like to watch any old-fashioned, well-made American film. They're much more satisfying than new ones. I'll watch any Bette Davis or Busby Berkeley or Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch movie. They were well-crafted and well-acted; that was the norm.''

Rupert Holmes, singer-songwriter of ``Escape (the Pina Colada Song),'' who also wrote the script and songs for ``Drood'' on Broadway, has written ``Remember WENN'' and its incidental music.

LuPone says she admires him as a person who collaborates instead of dictating, as opposed to her experience during her stint playing the mother of a Down syndrome son on ABC's ``Life Goes On,'' which ran from 1989 to 1993.

``I worked on a TV show for four years with a group of writers whose lines were sacred,'' she says. ``Rupert lets actors eliminate or change a word. He's not afraid. Hollywood writers barely know characters, let alone trust actors to know anything.''

The bulk of LuPone's experience has been on the stage.

Among her most notable roles, she played Eva Peron in ``Evita'' and Reno Sweeney in ``Anything Goes'' on Broadway and took on Norma Desmond in ``Sunset Boulevard'' in London.

And she has appeared in a play set in a 1930s radio station before: ``The Water Engine'' opened in 1978 at the Public Theater and moved to Broadway. It was about WCMJ of Chicago.

``I sang `Ten Cents a Dance' and `Limehouse Blues' and pushed the program's sponsor, Mallory Paints,'' she says of that production. ``I sang `Painting the Clouds with Sunshine' - `Get out there and paint your life with sunshine, and make sure the paint you use is Mallory.'

``I love the period so much,'' she says. ``We put on these clothes. They're better made, better fitted, more stylish, just feminine. I suppose that's all in your own opinion. I like it.''

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