To judge by the first show of a two-week
West End run, Mandy Patinkin’s status as a giant of the Broadway
musical is one he richly deserves but cannot altogether translate. Not
all has gone smoothly
en route here:
he
recounted how, his usual accompanist having fallen ill, he recruited
pianist Ben Toth at mere days’ notice and did not have time to rehearse
the entire set, as became apparent when he took several minutes’
affable, self-deprecating time out to re-master the complexities of
Stephen Sondheim’s “Franklin Shepherd Inc”. From a detached start – 25
minutes and several numbers before uttering an audible word to the
audience – Patinkin gradually became warmer and more garrulous,
culminating in an anecdote about comparing masculine assets with
William Hurt just as movie cameras rolled on the pair.
Patinkin is evidently a man who feels things intensely. When hitting
long or high notes he often half-crouches, eyes closed, reminiscent of
a fairground strongman about to bend an iron rod over one thigh. On
press night he prefaced his final number with a plea for peace in the
Middle East, and when delivering a grimmer-than-usual rendition of “Oh
What A Circus” from
Evita
(his Broadway breakthrough in 1979), he worked in a reference to Sarah
Palin before spitting the line “You did nothing at all”.
Herein lies his weakness. His heart is clearly huge, but his
modus operandi is to evoke common
emotions from us rather than to instil novel ones in us. He is keenly
aware of the nexus of America, Judaism and music, and is palpably in
the lineage of Jewish-American belters from Jolson to Streisand and
beyond. But, while a British audience may chuckle at his wry Yiddish
renditions of Berlin’s “White Christmas” and Sondheim and Bernstein’s
“Maria”, we do not tap into the same wellspring when he gives an
impassioned, pointedly bilingual delivery to Paul Simon’s “American
Tune”. Earlier, he segues from Prospero’s “Ye elves of hills…” speech
from
The Tempest into John
Lennon’s “Imagine”, delivering each with a heavy tremolo that kills
deep emotion rather than conveying it. He is an impressive singer and
performer, but I have to admit that I was dazzled only by two hours of
uninterrupted glare from a spotlight reflected off Toth’s piano lid.
Written for the Financial
Times.