Madonna's rep denies that she spent her time at the theatre on her phone, and that Miranda actually did invite her backstage.
In what’s been a pretty appalling week of negative PR for Madonna, there appears to be some good news at last, as the ‘theatre texting’ incident appears to be blowing over.
The New York Daily News reported at the weekend that the singer had started texting during an intimate off-Broadway theatre performance of ‘Hamilton’, a hip-hop musical directed by and starring Lin-Manuel Miranda. Taking the stage to appeal for charitable donations to Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, Miranda was reported to have made a barbed reference to someone in the audience who had been practicing poor etiquette.
After the performance, Miranda was reported by Playbill.com to have tweeted “Tonight was the first time I asked stage management NOT to allow a celebrity (who was texting all through Act 2) backstage. #noselfieforyou”. Taking these two statements together, many have assumed that person to be Madonna.
The theatre incident followed the legendary Drake kiss at Coachella
However, Madge’s representative Liz Rosenberg addressed the situation in a statement to Us Weekly, saying: “It's not true. She was invited backstage four different times. She texted post-show when they were doing their fundraising pitch. Madonna had already made a generous donation.”
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The 56 year old, who released her new album Rebel Heart in March, has been having a bit of a struggle with her image recently. On Tuesday, she suffered a severe social media backlash after sharing an Instagram picture praising the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, captioning the quotation: “If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.”
This didn’t go down too well with Madge’s gay and LGBT following: Thatcher’s Conservative government banned schools from “promoting homosexuality” during the 1980s. Madonna removed the picture later in the day.
And last weekend, she surprised Drake during his performance at Coachella festival by planting a big kiss on him during one of his songs which she was helping him perform. It was an incident that prompted thousands of hilarious memes over the following days.
More: Drake speaks about ‘that’ kiss with Madonna – the internet continues to have its fun
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