"Patinkin Closes His Eyes and Sets the Songs Free" New York Times June 1994 By Stephen Holden Mandy Patinkin belongs to the special breed of popular singer who is not content simply to dramatize the material he is handed. Like an obsessive Method actor, he incorporates song into his being and then releases it in an emotional eruption fraught with tension and personal catharsis. Depending on one's tolerance for an involvement this fierce, his performances can seem mawkish or transcendent. And on Friday evening at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, where he gave the last of three concerts of songs from his new album, "Experiment" (Elektra Nonesuch), his singing was as starkly compelling as it was restrained. On "Experiment," which is in some ways the best of his three solo albums, Mr. Patinkin has arranged 18 popular standards into an extended suite that describes one man's troubled psychic journey. Songs like "As Time Goes By," "I'm Old-Fashioned" and "Something's Coming" that uphold traditional romantic verities, gradually give way to songs of disillusion. Stephen Sondheim's "Good Thing Going" and Harry Chapin's "Taxi" find the characters' expectations dashed. "I Dreamed a Dream" from "Les Miserables" stands as the suite's flashpoint of anguished despair. But beginning with "The Road You Didn't Take," from "Follies," the character begins reassessing his life. Songs like "Where or When" and "Always" reassert his romantic faith. "Bring Him Home," from "Les Miserable," could be taken as the character's final acceptance of his own wounded inner child. And Cole Porter's wittily exhortative "Experiment," from "The Nymph Errant," is the suite's epigrammatic postscript. The singer, who was accompanied on piano by Paul Ford, performed the songs in the same order as they appear on the album, with the material broken into several thematic blocks. Without the album's orchestrations, the performance assumed the intimate aura of an art-song recital, whose intensity was enhanced by Mr. Patinkin's rapt stage demeanor. For much of the set, he sat slouched in a chair, his eyes closed in deep concentration. Despite a few coughs, Mr. Patinkin's voice seemed in good shape. Characteristically, his performance wedded stylistic extremes. The clenched, anxious perfectionism of his diction and intonation was balanced by an overarching melodic impulse that floated lyrical phrases into the air like flower petals blown across a pool.

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