"All singing, all dancing" San Francisco Examiner April 28, 1999 P. Elwood Mandy Patinkin, flying solo, makes quite a show. Mandy Patinkin, in baggy cotton pants, a short-sleeve shirt and white running shoes, rambles onto the Orpheum Theatre stage carrying a wicker basket of flowers under each arm. As his fans cheer he places the flowers at the footlights, acknowledges the reception and starts his show. That few minutes of Patinkin's 1999 concert is just about all, including the songs, that was similar to his last, 1996 performance in The City. Patinkin is at once a man of the theater singing songs and a singer in a theatrical role. He chatters along like a rapper, recalling funny events, reminiscing about composers, show business and bits of his life and then, suddenly, he's singing, double-time, wild and crazy lyrics to the "Minute Waltz." Next, he may turn to "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum," or, from "West Side Story," "Some Other Time." So justifiably sure of himself is Patinkin, alone on stage with a headset mike, accompanied by the brilliant pianist Paul Ford, that he makes it appear easy to skip from a Kurt Weill ballad to a funny parody of "April in Paris" titled, "April in Fairbanks," or "I'll Never Leave It Alive." He shifts the range of his voice comfortably from that of an Irish tenor to a Russian basso, matches Sondheim with Gershwin, and creates a medley out of "The Band Played On," from 1895, to "Once Upon a Time," from the 1962 musical, "All American." He sings a couple of Yiddish numbers, ending the wedding dance by crunching the goblet, and then he starts conducting a sing along/dance-along with the audience on "Hokey Pokey." Patinkin's 20 years on Broadway (he won a 1980 Tony as Che in "Evita") have seen him in more than a dozen shows, ranging from "Sunday in the Park With George," to "Henry IV, Part I" and "Leave it to Beaver is Dead." On stage at the Orpheum he's as capable of creating a perfect setting for a song as he is in portraying the performance style of, say, comic Red Skelton or "The World's Greatest Entertainer," Al Jolson. In a Skelton-like floppy hat down over his ears, Patinkin renders a delightful "I Love Her So Much I Could Die - Blues," and, on his knees, sings Jolson's "Sonny Boy." Jolson is being revived these days - Patinkin also sang his "Mammy," and followed a "Somewhere, Over the Rainbow," verse and all, with Jolson's "There's a Rainbow 'round My Shoulder." Patinkin sings medleys of two or three numbers - often by the same composer, sometimes not - which can leave a listener playing "Name that Song" with himself a number of times during the show. Patinkin very seldom mentions a song's title, let alone its composer. A perfectly wonderful song for "kidadults," based on "The Emperor's New Clothes," is, I guess, titled "The King Is in the Altogether." Delightful lyrics, a jolly good melodic line - all made especially entertaining by Patinkin's introductory narrative and, of course, singing.

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