Our second outing of the weekend (this time, just Madam Arcati and I) was one we simply could not miss, even if the timing made for a rather hectic two days - a truly legendary "master of his craft" live on stage in London for the first time since January 2009. The first man to play "Che Guevara" in Evita on Broadway, the original "George" in Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, actor in Yentl, The Princess Bride and Homeland - Mr Mandy Patinkin!
We're so glad we did...
This was an amazingly eclectic evening of song - the moment he followed his opening wistful medley of songs about childhood (Inchworm/School Days/Time in a Bottle) with a hilarious take on Ella's A Tisket A Tasket, complete with him mimicking the little girl who lost it and a "police investigation" into the loss, complete with megaphone, we knew we were in for something very different from the norm. Indeed, no-one could have predicted the spectacle of Mr Patinkin's "Silent Movie Medley" (that included Paramount Blues, Movies Were Movies, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows and more), in which he mimed some classic silent routines (pretending to tune a guitar, doing the "Chaplin walk", getting all flummoxed over a newspaper that keeps getting bidder and bigger as it unfolds, and so on) or his solo rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen!
"Patinkin the actor is on full display. He doesn’t perform songs as much as he wears them as costumes, draping melodies over the fully realised characters he conjures in each three-minute number. When not singing, he is joyous, joking with the audience and telling stories. He is an engaging performer, and against a plain curtained backdrop with nothing but a spotlight to focus one’s eye, he has the entire audience alternately silently enraptured and roaring with laughter." - Ian Bowkett, Musical Theatre Review
For those of who know him as an arch-Sondheimite, he threw everything but the book into a pairing of Sorry-Grateful and Being Alive. At another point in the show, he related a touching anecdote about the family record collection (in which Angela Lansbury's Mame cast recording was one of just four stacked in the radiogram), and the occasion his father took young Mandy all the way to New York just to see it (and get her autograph). Years later, when Mr Patinkin and Ms Lansbury's paths crossed again, he remarked to her that he wished it was his dad, not him, who was present at that occasion - then performed a remarkable version of the Sondheim title song from Ms Lansbury's debut musical, Anyone Can Whistle.
Sondheim aside, Mr Patinkin took us on a roller-coaster ride of emotions from the excoriating sadness of Randy Newman’s Wandering Boy and Marc Anthony Thompson’s My Mom to the very silly If I Had a Boat by Lyell Lovett (another mime, this time of riding a horse), from Easy Street to Can You Use Any Money Today? to the incredible and energetic "patter-song" Rock Island from The Music Man, and the powerful Soliloquy from Carousel.
"Not alone, however, Patinkin shares the spotlight with pianist Adam Ben David providing a tightly synchronised and pitch-perfect performance from the side of the stage. The pair’s idiosyncratic back and forth is delightful and refrains from being distracting. There’s this gloriously playful sense of ‘making it up as they go’, which far from the truth, makes for an easy-going night from the Broadway showman." - Dominic Corr, The Reviews Hub/Corr Blimey
All this, and he still found time for some amusing repartee, mostly around his age (puffing and mopping his brow) and purported inability to read his own prompt notes or get to the end of an anecdote about his Bar Mitzvah - before suddenly snapping into a serious medley of You've Got to be Carefully Taught/Children Will Listen, followed by Kermit the Frog's It's Not Easy Being Green. One reads between the lines the politics behind some of his choices of songs, given the current world situation. That was made startlingly clear when, as an encore, he reminded the audience of the context in which one of the world's most beloved songs was written - its writer and composer were both sons of East European Jews who had fled the pogroms - and launched into a most spine-tingling rendition of Over The Rainbow. In Yiddish!
We could hardly breathe.
This was a truly magnificent show - get to see it while you can!
Mandy Patinkin - Live in Concert runs at the Lyric Theatre until 19 November 2023.
Here's (a much younger) Mandy singing that startling medley he performed for us on Sunday:
Sublime.
