THEATER : What the Doctor Ordered : Sure, TV stardom is nice, but ‘Chicago Hope’ really cut into Mandy Patinkin’s quality time with the family. Ever since he left the regular cast, he’s so happy, he could sing.

Mandy Patinkin answers the front door of his homey Upper West Side apartment awash in apologies. The man who made sensitive singers of revolutionary Che Guevara, artist Georges Seurat and “Chicago Hope” heart surgeon Jeffrey Geiger is at the mercy of Julian the plasterer, and the place is a mess.

Not to worry. With cameo appearances by his wife, actress-writer Kathryn Grody, and 13-year-old son Isaac, the high-energy performer can turn even a chat at his dining room table into entertaining theater.

Whether he’s praising Oscar Hammerstein II and Stephen Sondheim--whose music propels his newest album, “Oscar & Steve”--or recapping his highly publicized departure last fall from “Chicago Hope,” Patinkin is, well, Patinkin.

He delivers an interview with the signature shtick and excess that draw big crowds to his concerts, where, among other bits, he asks for and receives standing ovations upon ringing a bell. It’s the same energy that fueled his Tony-winning performance as Che in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Evita,” and that he’s expected to bring to a six-performance visit to Hollywood’s James A. Doolittle Theatre starting Tuesday.

“What’s exciting about Mandy is you’re never quite sure what he’ll do next,” observes playwright-director James Lapine, who has directed Patinkin in such musicals as “Sunday in the Park With George” and such films as “Impromptu.” “He’s very much in and of the moment, which is what makes him unique. You get a real sense of spontaneity from him.”

Los Angeles audiences have seen some of that spontaneity onstage before. Patinkin, 43, was in “Evita” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1979 before the show went on to Broadway. And he has performed at the Hollywood Bowl, singing in both a guest spot and, in 1991, in a full-length concert with orchestra and a program that, according to The Times, roamed “merrily all over American pop-song territory.”

But this time around, Patinkin is the show, backed by just his longtime accompanist, pianist Paul Ford. That, after all, is how the concerts started in 1989.

Back then, Patinkin was appearing in Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” had recently recorded an album and was wondering what to do next with the material. The late Joe Papp, whose Public Theater was producing the play, suggested Patinkin try out a concert show using the theater complex, and indeed the same stage as the play, when it was dark on Monday nights.

“I walked out that first Monday night, and I was terrified,” Patinkin recalls. “But then I started, and I had the greatest time of my life. I just had a blast.”

When he finished shooting the 1990 film “Dick Tracy,” in which he played a character called 88 Keys, Patinkin moved his show to Broadway.

Writing in the New York Times, Stephen Holden called it “audacious, often brilliant, but also a touch wacky.” Hundreds of concerts followed all over the country.

Patinkin’s concert programs are continually changing. “The great thing about records,” he says, “is they force me to add new material, which I try out in the shows.” If the new material works, it might inspire another album, which in turn becomes the basis for another show. The process, he says, “is a great feeding ground for me.”

Patinkin doesn’t like to say in advance what he’ll sing in a given concert; he wants his audiences to be surprised, and he wants the option of changing his mind. But he expects that at least half his Los Angeles engagement will come from “Oscar & Steve.” His tribute to Hammerstein and Sondheim was released late last year by Nonesuch Records. The 18-song collection glides between the two men, sweeping in such shows as Hammerstein’s 1945 “Carousel” and Sondheim’s 1994 “Passion,” and sold more than 100,000 albums its first month out.

“It’s the words in a song that interest me, just like with a play or a musical or a film,” Patinkin says. “It’s what a person says, whether the words are about how to live your life or how to have a relationship or how to teach your children or how to just shut up and have a good time. I’ve never found that if those words were potent and interesting to me, that the music didn’t follow.

“My good fortune is that there is a reservoir of material by people who are true geniuses, who have written these incredible lessons. I get to be the mailman. I get to be the delivery boy for these words.”

But, Patinkin adds, the “true power” of the album comes from the relationship between the two men. Sondheim has referred to Hammerstein “nudging” him toward musicals, and the younger man even took his first musical, written when he was 15, to Hammerstein for comment. In “Sondheim & Co.,” Craig Zadan’s book about that composer, Sondheim explains how Hammerstein even outlined a study plan for him that ranged over a six-year period.

“Oscar was like Stephen’s father figure,” Patinkin explains. “When Stephen Sondheim saw ‘Carousel’ at 15, he wept in Mrs. Hammerstein’s arms. Stephen has said that if Oscar had been a geologist, he would have been one too.”

Such connections are very important to Patinkin. His choice of family over TV stardom, and the regular salary that goes with it, received considerable attention last fall when he left CBS’ medical drama “Chicago Hope,” having asked to be released from his five-year contract.

Why did he leave?

“It was very simple. I left because I did not have time to spend with my family. I was there 24 hours a day, eight days a week, and I had no time for a life.”

Patinkin hadn’t wanted to uproot his family--besides wife Kathryn and son Isaac, he has a 9-year-old son, Gideon--in order to do the series. But a bicoastal life, even for the nine-month shooting period, just didn’t cut it. When Isaac visited him in L.A. for a week last winter, for instance, it was a disaster.

“We had worked it out so I would be free,” Patinkin says, “but a script came in late and there were re-shoots, then four shows at once, and I never saw him. We’d go out at midnight and have a glass of juice or a cup of soup, and when he left, we were both in tears.”

In addition, Patinkin was learning 50 new pages every two weeks. And, as he readily acknowledges, he is not exactly a quick study.

“He really works hard,” director Lapine says. “He’s an obsessive fellow. He doesn’t do anything by halves. He’s incapable of it.”

While Patinkin was “grateful” his character had such a major role in the story line, he says it was just too much for him. “What happened to me was cumulative mental and physical exhaustion. I poured everything I had into the show.”

In fact, he says, even if his family had moved to Los Angeles, which they did consider at one point, it wouldn’t have helped; he would still never have been at home with them.

“I’d never have a weekend to be with the kids, to go to my sons’ soccer games,” Patinkin says. “My pockets would be stuffed with words. My head would be desperately trying to learn them, and I’d be in a continuous anxious state. I love the work but I loathed what it was doing to my family and my personal life.”

Now he says he considers the whole thing an important learning experience:

“I have said all my life that my family comes first and then I went and put enough work on my back for the Russian army, and I will never do that again as long as I live.”

His assorted bosses had families too--”they understood,” he says--and let him out of his contract. In return, he says, he is trying to book his work, including the concert tour, around return appearances on “Chicago Hope” as the plot demands.

Besides his current 20-city concert tour, Patinkin recently did a reading with Bernadette Peters of “Kiss Me Kate” for a possible New York revival directed by Lapine, and the singer confirms that he has “some ideas” about projects involving Al Jolson. He has also long been working on an album of Yiddish songs, some of which appear in his concerts, as well as a show built around them.

Patinkin was back in Los Angeles in mid-December to shoot an episode of “Chicago Hope” and may also hang around after this week’s concerts to do a few more. By way of explaining his continuing relationship with the CBS series, he quotes a scene that was cut from an earlier episode:

“The Adam Arkin character asks, ‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ and I say, ‘There was never a goodbye, Aaron. I’m here. I’m not. I’m here. I’m not. Goodbye was your idea.’ ”

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Mandy Patinkin, James A. Doolittle Theatre, 1615 N. Vine St., Hollywood. Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 3 p.m. $15-$55. (213) 365-3500.

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Oscar, Steve and Mandy

* To hear samples from Mandy Patinkin’s album “Oscar & Steve,” call TimesLine at 808-8463 and press *5712.

In 805 area code, call (818) 808-8463.