by William Ruhlmann\r In 1980, Patti LuPone won her first Tony Award for best actress in a musical for her portrayal of Eva Peron, the ambitious, doomed wife of Argentine dictator Juan Peron, in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Evita. In 2008, LuPone won her second Tony as Mama Rose, the maniacal stage mother of Gypsy Rose Lee, in a revival of Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim's Gypsy. In between, she maintained a career as one of the most successful musical theater stars of her generation. Unlike predecessors such as Mary Martin and Ethel Merman, however, she did not work in a theater environment that allowed her to go from show to show with few interruptions. Instead, while waiting for contemporary composers to come up with new shows worthy of her talent or producers to mount revivals in which she could star, she filled the time acting in straight plays, in films, and on television; created nightclub acts and mounted concert tours; a...