For a while there, Patti LuPone was having a nervous breakdown nightly, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

In a performance that earned her Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards, LuPone was Mama Rose in “Gypsy” on Broadway.

Eight shows a week, it was her task to sing the Everest of show tunes, “Rose’s Turn,” in which her character – the stage mother to top all stage mothers – finds herself cast aside by her girls.

She wails, she cries, she’s broken, but she emerges defiant in the end.

Quite a song.

“I was exhausted by the end of the run,” says LuPone, who helps to kick off the 32nd season at Purchase College’s Performing Arts Center with an Oct. 3 concert titled “Matters of the Heart.”

She has taken time to decompress from Mama Rose, which closed in January, but she hasn’t stopped singing. She toured Australia with her “Evita” co-star, Mandy Patinkin, and found audiences enthusiastic.

“We’re all the same person,” LuPone says. “It doesn’t matter where we live or the color of our skin. Every audience I’ve ever played to responds the same way. They appreciate the music and the singer.”

At Purchase, she’ll be backed by a five-piece band, but she won’t be taking a turn at “Rose’s Turn.”

“I sing that at some concerts, but not in ‘Matters of the Heart,’” she says.

(Read how you can meet Patti after the show—and season highlights—here.)

Like many singers, LuPone walks around with a trunk full of songs in their head, but she doesn’t sing them on a moment’s notice.

“I have to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse,” says the Tony-winner, who famously played the tuba in John Doyle’s new take on Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” a few seasons back.

“I have all those songs in my head, but I can’t sing them at the drop of a hat. I have to filter through all the lyrics and put everything in order before I sing the song. And that takes rehearsal.”

She has performed her Purchase-bound repertoire before – two hours of songs about love, from “I’m In Love With a Wonderful Guy” and “Hello, Young Lovers” by Rodgers & Hammerstein to Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By” and “Being Alive” – but no matter how many times she’s sung them, readying a show still requires rehearsal, she says.

Are there songs she retires, that she won’t sing anymore?

“I won’t sing songs from ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ but that’s about it,” she says.

Why is that?

“Because I don’t like them and I don’t want to sing them,” she says.

LuPone has done a turn on TV, most notably as Libby Thatcher in the long-running “Life Goes On,” and says she’d welcome a return to the small screen, if the right job presented itself.

“I think the worst job in show business is an hour-long show, because you have no life; you’re working 14 to 16 hours a day,” she says. “It’s like making a movie in a week, which is very difficult.”

On the other hand, a half-hour situation comedy is “the most like theater and it’s the easiest job and probably the most rewarding in television-land because you play to a live audience.”

Live audiences at the Ravinia Festival in Illinois have come to expect a summer visit from LuPone. It’s her artistic home away from home, where the actress’ Mama Rose took her first steps toward all those awards.

Next August, LuPone will be back at Ravinia to tackle another role created by Ethel Merman – the first “Mama Rose” – when she and Brian Stokes Mitchell mark the 150th birthday of Annie Oakley with a three-night concert version of Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun.”

The festival has allowed her to expand her artistic horizons: This summer, she was featured soloist as music director James Conlon led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the music of Kurt Weill (“Threepenny Opera”).

LuPone is wild about Weill.

“He could write anything and he was a chameleon whose songs sounded French, if he was working with a French lyricist, or German, if he was working with a German. The music is just spectacular.”

The concert got her thinking. She’s planning to approach the Weill estate, to take a crack at the composer’s French cabaret songs, perhaps even making an act of them.

“I would looooooove to do that,” she coos.

Of course, it will require rehearsal.

IF YOU GO
What: Patti LuPone’s “Matters of the Heart”
When: 8 p.m. Oct. 3.
Where: Concert Hall at the Purchase College Performing Arts Center, Anderson Hill Road, Purchase.
Tickets: $82.50, $72.50, $52.50. If you reserve in advance and pay $100 more, you can attend a post-show reception with LuPone.
Call: 914-251-6200.
Web: www.artscenter.org