Actor-Singer Mandy Patinkin Bares His Talent

Call it bare bones. Stripped down. Unplugged.

Call it Mandy Patinkin in concert--a minimalist theatrical extravaganza. Because that’s what the overflow audience at the Orange County Performing Arts Center got on Thursday night: Broadway singer-actor Patinkin on a bare stage, with no sets, no orchestra, no fancy lighting. Nothing more than two baskets of flowers, which Patinkin brought out himself, and the accompaniment of Paul Ford, who worked on an unobtrusive upright piano.

But Patinkin’s oversized talent was enough to fill the room with two hours of nonstop entertainment.

He opened the evening with a reminiscence about his wedding, crushing a wine glass in the process and handing its shards to a front-row listener. He sang “White Christmas” and “God Bless America” in Yiddish, with an enormous American flag (the evening’s sole major theatrical prop) as a backdrop for the latter.

He blended tunes in unlikely but thoughtful medleys--Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” with Stephen Sondheim’s “Children Will Listen.” He was melodramatic with the “Soliloquy” from “Carousel” and Sondheim’s “Not a Day Goes By,” and roguishly declamatory as Professor Harold Hill, singing “You Got Trouble” from “The Music Man.”

Patinkin, in other words, saw the entire landscape of American musical theater as his canvas. His ebullient, sometimes arrogantly self-confident manner seemed to suggest that no song, no style, no character, no manner was beyond the reach of his talent. And, to his credit, he was right most of the time.

He has a voice that can move, in a split second, from high, purring head tones, to thunderous, open-throat, chest-pounding climaxes. And he can dramatize a song’s story--as he did repeatedly--down to its very bones. It was a bravura performance, a sterling example of a musical actor working his craft to the limit.

It also, however, was a performance with an elusive soul. While there’s no denying Patinkin’s stunning theatrical skills, one was more often awed by the diversity and the versatility of those skills than touched by the uncluttered simplicity of his emotional communication.

Patinkin had no trouble filling the theater with his humor, his characterizations and his musical dexterity. But, with the exception of some small, unexpectedly intimate moments--his renderings of Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” and Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Aguas de Marco” were perfect examples--it was a performance of externals rather than internals, a display of acting proficiency rather than a sharing of insights, and, at the bottom line, a bit too much ado about Patinkin.