POP MUSIC REVIEW : A Handy-Dandy Mandy at the Performing Arts Center

Even as he sang, there was no forgetting Friday night that Mandy Patinkin is an actor.

Known for his roles on stage in “Evita,” “The Secret Garden” and “Sunday in the Park With George,” and in such movies as “Princess Bride,” “Yentl” and “Dick Tracy,” Patinkin appeared with the Pacific Symphony at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (see Ann Conway’s column, E1). Though he displayed formidable singing talents, he was most impressive in the variety of vocal roles he assumed while displaying the kind of stage presence more associated with the theater than the concert hall.

Using his own career as a touchstone, he presented a compact, fast-paced program awash in music from Broadway and Hollywood with plenty of nostalgic touches.

Dressed casually in flannel shirt, baggy pants and running shoes (his latest recording is titled “Dress Casual”), the Tony winner came out with two baskets of flowers that he placed on either side of the stage--baskets toward which he would gesture every time the word “flowers” came up in a song.

At different times, he went all out fashioning numbers into theater. With the aid of a note pad and a bullhorn, he turned “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” into a scene from “Police Story.”

Right from the beginning, he left no doubts about his vocal abilities: He opened with a treatment of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” that milked the lyric for all the melancholy in it. At the song’s end, he hit an amazingly pure high note that brought gasps from the audience.

He proved himself capable of great warmth, character and clarity along a wide range, moving seamlessly into a falsetto that was as firm and fluid as his middle tones. Though his vibrato has, at times, an almost automatic quality, he used it to nonetheless great effect.

A strong visual presence helped make his voice even more convincing. Even while seated in front of the orchestra, as he was for the first three numbers, he was able to generate sincerity by extending his arms, clutching his pants and working his eyebrows.

At one point, he asked members of the audience to join him on stage, an offer accepted by several women who took advantage of the chance to embrace and even pinch the singer.

Conducted by Keith Lockhart, the Pacific Symphony acquitted itself well behind Patinkin, providing lush string overlays on quiet numbers and sassy jazz swing during up-tempo passages. Patinkin’s own accompanist, Paul Ford, pulled a richness from the piano that complemented the singer’s strength and kept the music flowing, even near the end of the show when Patinkin honored a pair of requests from the audience.

Without Patinkin, under the direction of conductor Joel Levine of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the orchestra opened the program with a quintet of Broadway overtures, not all of them well known, including Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “The Cat and the Fiddle” and Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.”

The “The King and I” and “Funny Girl” (whose overture, Levine noted, came from the film version) also were on the bill. The highlight was the Kurt Weill-Ira Gershwin collaboration “Lady in the Dark,” with its jazzy brass section and wild boogie-woogie.

Throughout, the orchestra played with clarity and a bit of snap--something much more easily achieved with a pit orchestra, for which most of these scores were written, than a full symphony.