Patinkin Shows How Dazzling, dramatic sampler of songs from Broadway By Steven Winn San Francisco Chronicle January 1, 1997 The slovenly stage is meant to be misleading. Make nothing of the bare work lights and ladder and exposed back wall. And pay no attention to the star's costume -- black jeans and T-shirt and running shoes -- when he shambles onstage trailing a microphone cord and toting two baskets of fresh flowers. "Mandy Patinkin in Concert" is a faux low-rent showcase for Broadway's version of the High Baroque. Whether he's warbling a Stephen Sondheim phrase in tremulous falsetto or fist-pumping numbers from "South Pacific" and "The Music Man" into fire-and-brimstone sermons, Patinkin constantly blends the borders of musical expression into his own inimitable range. Daring, exhilarating and humanly flawed, the two-hour concert at the Orpheum Theatre delivers the goods. Here's entertainment, idiosyncratic and unmistakably real. Best known as TV's edgy Dr. Jeffrey Geiger on"Chicago Hope," a series he's just left, Patinkin affirms his showbiz roots with a program of Sondheim and Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Harry Chapin and others. The songs are chosen, melded and performed, with the dexterous Paul Ford at an upright piano, to carve out an immediate emotional impact. Sometimes it's tender and ethereal. When Patinkin puts Sondheim's "Loving You" together with Hammerstein's "If I Loved You," the medley becomes a rich catalog of rapture and longing. Sometimes its feverish and ferocious. Patinkin gets all of Billy Bigelow's raw ache into the discursive "Soliloquy" from "Carousel" and heats into an instant, indignant lather over "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught," the lesson on racism from "South Pacific." And sometimes such antic shtick takes over. Patinkin pulls out a bullhorn to turn "A Tisket, A Tasket" into a police interrogation and flips into Yiddish for some of Che Guevara's lines from "Evita." That show launched Patinkin's career in a pre-Broadway tour that played the Orpheum 17 and a half years ago. For his first engagement here since then, he says, he wanted his modest old dressing room again. When Patinkin throws open his arms and says how much he loves San Francisco, it seems heartfelt -- like everything he does onstage. Patinkin's "Evita" sampler, late in the evening, is a crowd pleaser for anyone who remembers his insouciant mastery of the role. It's also, at some level, a way of reclaiming Che from the "Evita" film -- Patinkin did an amusing little riff on Madonna on opening night. But this show is no dullful reprise of Patinkin's stage life. There's nothing from "Sunday in the Park With George" or "The Secret Garden." Instead we go where Patinkin has gone since his "Dress Casual" concert tour of 1989. Whether it's something as unlikely as an old rocking horse like "School Days" or a number as dangerously familiar as "Over the Rainbow," Patinkin turns songs into stories layered with feeling. His tools can sound and look mannered and are not always pretty. His famous athletic voice will hover on a high falsetto, plunge into a bass and leap to the peaks again -- not necessarily with pure musical finesse. His face squinches up in pain. He grips a fistful of his jeans of the back of a chair. And he holds onto his reluctant captives from the audience too long for the sing-along "Honey Bun." But Patinkin takes the listener on a journey as few other performers can. You get lost with him on Chapin's "Taxi" ride, where a lost lover "took off for the footlights and I took off for the sky." Memories, regrets, lost lover are the shimmering through-lines of the show. Patinkin scales the dramatic peaks of "Not A Day Goes By" or "If I Loved You" with fervor. But he also finds a sense of wonder in the most unassuming phrases. "Remember the hills, my darling," he softly urges in "School Days," and the heart of the listener floats back over some forgotten landscape. Patinkin bounces through Bernstein's "Wrong-Note Rag" and bargains shrewdly with Irving Berlin's "Cohen." When he sits down in a chair and reminds us that "Children Will Listen," the simplicity of that anthem from Sondheim's "Into the Woods" feels fresh and profound. For all the extravagance of his technique, Patinkin never seems to sell a song. He inhabits it, eyes shining, and tries to open every door and window in it. "Experiment," Patinkin suggests at the end of the night, seated on the stage apron and peering into the balconies, blessing the new year with Porter's plea to rediscover the world and ourselves. The Orpheum, due for a major enlargement of its stage and other improvements, will be dark for more than a year after Patinkin departs on Sunday. "Mandy Patinkin in Concert" sheds a glowing last light on the house.

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