Leaning over the coffee table in his Chicago hotel room, singer Mandy Patinkin launches into a spectacular fusion of lyrics and commentary to reveal how he inhabits a song.
“A father is talking to his daughter in an open field,” he explains, his blunt Midwestern voice seeming to punctuate each phrase with an unspoken “see?” “and he’s saying, `A guy will come, but don’t wait for him, because you don’t know when he’s going to come.’ “
Picking up speed, his delivery running an expressive parallel to the narrative he’s describing, Patinkin half-sings Stephen Sondheim’s “There Must Be Trumpets”–one of more than a dozen numbers on his latest CD, “Oscar & Steve,” an homage to songmeisters Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein.
” `There won’t be trumpets, or bolts of fire, to say he’s coming/no Roman candles, no angels choir’–now she wants to look for him–`not with trumpets or lightning flashing or shining armor/he may be daring, he may be dashing or maybe he’s a farmer’–now I’m starting to shout, because she’s over there looking for him, on a hill–`he had lots of hills to climb/and a hero doesn’t come ’til the nick of time’–now I’m really shouting, because she’s running over the hill to see him–`don’t know when, don’t know where/and I can’t even say that I care/all I know is the minute you turn and he’s suddenly there’–now you see this white knight come and she jumps on his horse, and it’s like they’re on a carousel rising into the clouds–`there are no trumpets/who needs trum-
pets!’ “
With this mini-performance concluded, Patinkin, who’ll sing all-out at the Shubert Theatre Jan. 9 through 14, sinks back into his chair and adds, “You may not hear that at all when you listen to the song. I don’t care. I needed it to mean something to me.”
The segue from that excitedly rendered exegesis to the seemingly dismissive “I don’t care” is typical Patinkin, a scrapper who wears his heart on his sleeve but isn’t about to take any guff for it. While there’s a trace in his tone of the abrasiveness he brought to the unstrung Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on the CBS series “Chicago Hope,” the remark really mirrors the unchecked emotional pitch that has made Patinkin a vocal stylist whose way with a lyric strikes a chord with countless listeners.
While he loves to deliver a song with a dramatic flair drawn from the larger-than-life sensibility of Broadway, he’s equally adept at giving a ballad a reading so original and intimate, it sounds as if one’s hearing the words for the first time.
“Mandy has that kind of voice that speaks directly to the soul,” says composer Lucy Simon, who had Patinkin in mind when she wrote the musical version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “The Secret Garden,” in which Patinkin played Uncle Archibald on Broadway. “I think it’s a combination of vocal cords, a gift with which he was born, like beautiful eyes or great hair, and what he brings as a person to the song he’s singing. Without question he’s the best stage singer and actor there is.”
Patinkin, whose decision to check out of “Chicago Hope” (with an Emmy in hand) was something of a show business bombshell, has come through the trials of weekly television with a new perspective on his personal and professional priorities.
“TV never stops. You’re there 16 hours a day. And here I was playing a nut,” he laughs, “who had all the answers at the tip of his fingers, but he had gloves on–and they were bloody! The irony is that it has been one of the greatest lessons of my life. I will never put myself in a position where I say that my family comes first, but then put enough work on my back for the Russian army.”
The rigors of television may have made his life not his own, but when it comes to music, Patinkin enjoys creative control. “The beauty of singing is, I choose the stuff I want to sing. And when I sing, it reaffirms all the things I need to be thinking about, the things I need to hear, the ideas I want to be living.”
Making those choices is easy. “I like songs with stories. And guys like Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter and Steve Sondheim are great, great storytellers. They’ve made what my friend (New York deejay) Jonathan Schwartz calls American classical music.
“I think what makes something classical is a certain timelessness. I think why certain things from certain generations do not become classical but become more historical is because they come from a kind of manic youth, that part of our growing up that we choose to forget as opposed to the part of our growing up that is much more idealistic and hopeful–the Beatles as opposed to a kind of screaming rock ‘n’ roll that didn’t have a message.
“I think the music that isn’t hysterical becomes classical. And the other stuff is what you listen to when you get together with your buddies and drink beer and think you’re 18 again.”
Chicago roots
Patinkin, who won a Tony Award for his portrayal of Che Guevara in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita” and whose film credits include “Ragtime,” “Yentl” and “The Princess Bride,” grew up singing in the choir of Congregation Rodfei Zedek at 52nd and Hyde Park Boulevard. Like many successful performers, he stumbled into theater when his mother suggested he try out for a play at an area youth center.
“We didn’t play music in the house very much,” he recalls, “but my dad had every album of `Mame.’ He had Skitch Henderson’s `Mame’! For my bar mitzvah present–and I’m not sure why, because this was before I got involved in this stuff–he took me to New York to see `Walking Happy’ at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and `Mame’ with Angela Lansbury. We waited at the stage door to get her autograph. But my folks didn’t take me to the theater much. The only reason I got into it, I guess, was because I ended up in the youth center doing musicals.”
Although New York has been home for many years, the 43-year-old father of two (he’s married to actress-author Kathryn Grody) returns to town regularly for work or family reunions. In the early 1980s, visitors to the Art Institute may have seen him exhibiting some incipient Geigeresque behavior standing before Georges Seurat’s monumental canvas, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the inspiration for Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning musical “Sunday in the Park With George.”
“Before we went to Broadway, I spent three days in front of the painting. I talked to the painting, I did the whole second act with the painting. People thought I was out of my mind.”
Sondheim may have thought the same thing when Patinkin burst into tears during a rehearsal. “It was a scene with my mother,” Patinkin explains. “Steve had written her part of the song, but he hadn’t written my part. I was so angry and frustrated that I just wept. He said to me afterwards, `I’m going to write the song tonight; I want to pick your brain.’ We ended up talking on the telephone for several hours about mothers, about trying to communicate, about making the connection and then feeling that connection pass, about never being able to let go of the desire to connect with someone you love. It was one of the more amazing conversations I’d ever had. Three days later he walked in and our whole conversation had been set to poetry and music. It was one of the great thrills of my life.”
Today, Patinkin is widely regarded as the quintessential Sondheim interpreter, and Sondheim himself is quick to praise him. He told talk show host Larry King: “Mandy is one of the most extraordinarily talented people I’ve ever worked with. I’d written the part in `Sunday in the Park With George’ for a baritone because it’s written about a repressed fellow, and Mandy insisted on auditioning, even though he’s a tenor, or a lyric baritone at the lowest. Of course, he was brilliant.”
Music comes first
Although he has just shot a feature film (“The First Wives Club,” co-starring Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn, Maggie Smith and Sarah Jessica Parker) and will make a guest appearance on “Chicago Hope” Jan. 8, Patinkin remains committed to his music. With numbers from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” “The Sound of Music,” “Flower Drum Song” and Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” “Passion” and “A Little Night Music” added to his repertoire, it sounds as though he’s fallen in love with American musical theater all over again.
“When I go back to singing, I always turn to Kathryn and say, `Man, that made me feel great.’ To me, one of the great, great pleasures of concertizing this kind of music is not performing it, but listening to the audience listen to it. And me getting to listen to it too, and not be alone listening to it. I get to be with a group of people listening to something that these guys wrote. I just happen to be the delivery man.”
THE FACTS
Mandy Patinkin
When: Jan. 9 through 14
Where: Shubert Theatre, 22 W. Monroe St.
Tickets: $17.40-$40
Call: 312-902-1500
