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"There is nothing alienated about Mandy PatinkinÕs menacing Burrs in The Wild Party. Making a Broadway return from television, the Tony Award-winning actor who played Che Guevara in Evita, scowls, fumes, spits and sputters. As a singer, he must bring off LaChiusa's dark, jazz-tinged, atonally inclined score which challenges its performers to cover a wider vocal range. In BurrsÕ case, the singing swings from a lilting falsetto to an angry vibrato, a striking contrast that musically evokes a barely repressed viciousness that he can only channel when he performs in blackface. In The Wild Party, Burrs and his vaudeville dancer girlfriend, Queenie, throw a mad bash soaked in voracious sex and bathtub gin. During the revelry, Queenie sleeps with a Latino moocher, named Black. Mired in the jealousy and bitterness, Burrs rages like a tiger, and in the fight that follows Black kills Burrs. Burrs, too, has a killer number, ÒHow Many Women in the World?Ó ÐÐ but by then heÕs just gone off the edge. Patinkin plays Burrs like Al Jolson gone psycho." --theatre.com "The songs couldn't be better showcased, particularly by its three leads, Mandy Patinkin, Toni Collette and the eternally young Eartha Kitt. Patinkin always has been a dangerous, possessed performer, willing to push to the edge in portraying a character. That fearlessness works to his advantage in ``The Wild Party,'' as he creates a Burrs whose almost psychotic jealousy not only seems plausible but inevitable. And the range of that voice! Whether bass or falsetto, it commands the stage. " --M. Kuchwara, Associated Press "Mandy Patinkin, in The Wild Party There is nothing equivocal about Patinkin: He always makes fearless acting choices and pushes the envelope of intensity. At The Wild Party, his fans are eating up his performance as Burrs, a violent vaudeville clown who performs as a "coon singer," in blackface, a la Al Jolson. Patinkin, remembered as Che in Evita, Uncle Archie in The Secret Garden and George in Sunday in the Park With George, delivers the vocal fireworks, and his get-out-of-the-way showing (true to the source material) articulates how utterly menacing the character is. Without menace, there is no Wild Party. Analysis: Patinkin (for his history and his passion) and 2000 Drama Desk Award-winner Mitchell (for his ability to break out of musical drama and cross into musical comedy) are considered the favorites here, although Tony voters tend to like it when movie stars such as Walken bring attention to Broadway (his limited singing voice may be a handicap). Bierko is appealing, but seen as a longshot due to his lack of Broadway history and the fact that some perceive his role as forever belonging to Preston, whose soundalike performance is captured on film. Don't count out Hearn, a dark horse whose performance was viewed as masterful, sophisticated and dignified." --playbill.com "... Wearing a platinum hairdo and a big fake smile, Toni Collette plays Queenie, a dancer/stripper who is caught in a fatal tango with a clown named Burrs. Mandy Patinkin turns him into a crooner in the Al Jolson mold: This Burrs makes his entrance in blackface and delivers most of his lines with an ingratiating Amos 'n' Andy-style accent. Amazingly, Mr. Patinkin pulls it off. He's a performer of almost frightening intensity who can take an audience with him almost anywhere he wants to go." --Wall St. Journal "... The woman is in a relationship with the failing, angry, doomed vaudevillian comic Burrs, incarnated with an eerie intensity by Mandy Patinkin. Patinkin becomes at extreme moments of tension a manic, black-face performer. He's an Al Jolson from hell, a white man ill at ease with the black idiom he has appropriated. Patinkin is magnificent in his mad, frenzied appetite to thrust his bitterness on all the revelers - including us, who are forced to join in his jibes. ." --New York Post (Click to read full review) "...Burrs is the most clearly unhappy. His "blacking up" style of vaudeville is as close to collapse as his relationship with his vaudeville dancer girl friend, Queenie. He is the maniacal presence who never quite lets us forget that this 1929 party like the decade will come to a sobering end over Queenie's attraction to a stranger at the party. As that menacing and moody presence, Mandy Patinkin is perfectly cast (and this from one who is not one of Mr. Patinkin's devotees). As the blonde dancer he loves with abusive possessiveness, Toni Collette evokes images of Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and proves herself as a vivacious actress and topnotch singer. By creating an actual vaudeville as an overture to the party Burrs and Queenie throw as a pick-me-up for their troublesome relationship, George C. Wolfe, clever showman that he is, has managed to be true to the March poem and also made his orgy a symbol for the end of the good times for vaudeville... ... The perfect Beauty and the Beast leads, Collette and Patinkin -- one a more than promising Broadway newcomer by way of the movies, the other a much loved stage veteran -- have plenty of strong allies. " --Curtain Up (Click for full review.) "Thus the magnificent Mandy Patinkin plays Burrs as a blackface minstrel, a down-at-the-heels Al Jolson so far up the Swanee he'll never get back. ... Full of joy and horror, pleasure and warning, "The Wild Party" shows the American musical to be very much alive, and still able to deliver a ferocious kick." --New York Daily News (Click to read full article "Wotta 'Party'! Musical a 'Wild' ride thru Jazz Age N.Y.") "Before the first cocktails at "The Wild Party" are downed, Toni Collette is hoisted topless into the spotlight and Mandy Patinkin is doing a wicked Al Jolson impersonation. By the time the evening's over, Eartha Kitt has left a pair of Jewish impresarios gasping for breath and Tonya Pinkins has sung a mean blues. Vaudeville meets screwball comedy meets ironic history in George C. Wolfe and John LaChiusa's musical adaptation of Joseph Moncure March's Jazz Age poem; even on a Broadway full of Fosse, this may be the edgiest entertainment around. As Queenie, a vaudeville dancer who's been around the block a few too many times, Collette flounces magnificently. Patinkin sends up minstrelsy all night long as Burrs, her clown boyfriend, only to finally reveal an authentically evil desperation. And, in a role which has obviously been written especially for her, Ms. Kitt almost steals the show as an ageless vamp who's seen and done it all."--City Search (Cllick to read full text.) " Mandy Patinkin's all-out performance as the savage party host, Burrs, who appears in blackface in parts of the show, represents the edgy, big, unequivocal quality of the piece, which celebrates "sin" and "gin" in equal parts." --Playbill Online "Lest you think of this as a drawing card, you should know, for example, that Mr. Patinkin, a febrile performer in even his calmest moments, is first seen in blackface making like Al Jolson. .. ...Yet what has wound up on the stage is a portrait of desperation that itself feels harshly, wantonly desperate. When Mr. Patinkin, portraying the brutish host of the party of the title, bodily drags a couple of reluctant businessmen into the action, yelling, "Come on i-i-i-n," he sums up the relationship between the performers and the audience in an evening of acting as strong-arming. ...As for Mr. Patinkin, he works like a Trojan, feverishly plying the wide array of vocal mannerisms and tics for which he is famous, but to oddly little effect. It is his character who early on articulates the evening's formula: "Gin, skin, sin, fun." Mr. Patinkin stretches each of these words into two anguished syllables, while wearing the rictus of someone who has just had spikes driven into his toes. It's the perfect preface to the fu-un, fu-un, fu-un that follows." --New York Times (Click to read full review "Having Fun Yet, Jazz Babies?") "As Patinkin's Burrs sings in a key song, ''Fidelity is a virtue/Too many of you lack/Monogamy can exert you/Keeping track of what goes on/Behind your back...'' The authors have also unearthed some intriguing emotional underpinnings in the characters that would pay better dividends if they were more deeply explored... ...Patinkin ably projects Burrs' energy and glinting menace, and his singing -- the sweet falsetto contrasted with a reverberant vibrato -- perfectly captures the character's dueling impulses."--Reuters "This new "Wild Party," coauthored and directed in part as a Brechtian vaudeville by the Public's savvy George C. Wolfe, also does not quite know how to end. But the piece drips with enough fresh red meat to have lured the world-class theatrical carnivores Mandy Patinkin and Eartha Kitt back to Broadway-he for his first time in a decade, she for the first time since 1978... ...Patinkin, back where we need him after a perilously successful trip to Hollywood and solo concerts of incremental self-parody, has found an eerily worthy spirit in whom to channel his loose-cannon furies and idiosyncratic vocal splendors. The talented LaChiusa, back from the high-minded tedium of last fall's "Marie Christine," gives Patinkin an out-there character for whom too much is just right, and show-stoppers that tap into his head tones, his chest tones, his toe tones, his top-of-his-head tones. Patinkin is the lightning rod that keeps connecting the couple's all-night party to the demonic dangers beneath the surface. He and Kitt, who can still curl her ageless, I'm-still-here persona to the balcony, create the only seriously scary characters. " --New York News Day (Click to read full article.) "Mandy Patinkin gives a startling and risky performance as the psychotic, homicidal Burrs. Eartha Kitt is - wonderfully - Eartha Kitt and can do no wrong as the experienced survivor Dolores. Toni Collette, though she seems to be channeling Marilyn Monroe at several points during the evening, manages a touching and ultimately vulnerable Queenie.... ...With The Wild Party, LaChiusa and Wolfe have proved that the good, old-fashioned book musical form is still vibrant and very much alive. Bravo! " --Talkin Broadway (Click to read full text.) "Staging a climactic orgy is never easy, let alone a musical orgy. The Broadway "Party" begins at a manic, feverish pitch; the sight of Patinkin's Burrs in Jolson-like blackface is wonderfully unsettling..." --Los Angeles Times (Click for full text.) "Although some of the bitchy repartee feels microwaved, the performers generally have vivid material to work with, and they do it justice. Patinkin ably projects Burrs' energy and glinting menace, and his singing, the sweet falsetto contrasted with a reverberant vibrato, perfectly captures the character's dueling impulses." --Variety "...On Broadway, George C. WolfeÕs The Wild Party, by comparison, has a slightly better book, an equally uneven score, worse set design, but a cast to die for. Mandy Patinkin plays his Burrs so close to the edge that you can almost see the dark pit of his soul." --theatermania.com "Great use is made of the malevolent Burrs' vocation as a clown -- and Patinkin's gleeful, manic intensity -- in several funny-eerie scenes, most notably in a savagely amusing song called "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"" --The Record "Patinkin is stupefyingly overwrought as Burrs, played as a grotesque cross between Al Jolson (Burrs' clown act is in blackface) and Mr. Hyde. When Patinkin steps downstage near the end of the show to vent Burr's misogyny in a song called "How Many Women in the World?", I dare you to keep a straight face." --Philadelphia Inquirer (Click for full text of story, "The Wild Party is Anything But" ) "Mandy Patinkin offers his trademark in-your-face, take-no-prisoners intensity; while he's doing all that's required, and even looks a bit like the Burrs of Art Spiegelman's published illustrations, it's hard to forget he's Patinkin, and he projects a bit too much intelligence for the thuggish character." --broadway.com (Click for full text.) "As Burrs, Mandy Patinkin does some super-creepy things with grating falsetto and clumsy audience participation. He is as diabolic as he is over-the-top -- call it deviled ham. " --New York Magazine (Click for full text.) From an interview with George Wolfe, writer-director of The Wild Party at broadway.com: Question: "Do you have any comment to The Post's story about Mandy Patinkin's alleged bad behavior behind the scenes?" Answer: "I don't really have a comment but my general comment is that artists are very peculiar people. If you scrutinize anyone's behavior, you might go, "Oh my God. What's wrong with that person?" If you isolate anyone's behavior away from a situationÉ and in this piece [the performers are] exposing themselves and revealing themselves to incredibly dark and intense places. It produces very interesting dynamics in the rehearsal room and that's just part of the process. Every show I've worked on, from Jelly's Last Jam to Angels in America, had moments where all kinds of insane madness took over. It just happens. Perfectly rational, functioning people end up going to extremes because the material takes you there. To isolate that behavior and present it as if the person's working at IBM is incorrect. " (Click to read original Post article.) "That sound you heard during the reading of the nominations was a huge, collective sigh from everyone associated with The Wild Party; the nominating committee provided a lifeline to the Michael John LaChiusa/George C. Wolfe show in the form of seven nominations, including Best Musical. (It had been widely rumored that the showÑwhich has been floundering at the box officeÑwould have immediately posted a closing notice had it not been among the Best Musical hopefuls.) ... But Mandy Patinkin was nominated for his role of Burrs in The Wild Party even though he missed several critics performancesÑand despite widespread reports of PatinkinÕs highly erratic, thoroughly unprofessional behavior during rehearsals for the show." --theatermania.com RE The Wild Party cast album: "This Party boasts a dream ensemble, with every one of the 15 cast members making significant contributions, and all of them shine on disc. For some, Toni ColletteÕs vocals will be the biggest surprise here. Of course, Mandy Patinkin and Kitt are highly skilled singers and recording artists." --Ken Mandelbaum, broadway.com "...and Mandy Patinkin overreaches so egregiously you can't help but think of...Mandy Patinkin." -- Entertainment Weekly "Generations before us still recount the luminous performances of Merman's Rose, Lansbury's Mame, and Preston's Harold Hill and now we'll be adding a few from The Wild Party: Collette's Queenie, Kitt's Delores and Patinkin's Burrs to our list of unforgettables." --Talkin' Broadway "Mandy Patinkin offers his trademark in-your-face, take-no-prisoners intensity; while he's doing all that's required, and even looks a bit like the Burrs of Art Spiegelman's published illustrations, it's hard to forget he's Patinkin, and he projects a bit too much intelligence for the thuggish character." --theatre.com "The only vocal flaw on the LaChiusa CD, oddly enough, is Mandy Patinkin, who seems to be playing the role he was re-born to play; the Al Jolson-esque clown, Burrs. While stylistically he is probably perfect for the part, he nonetheless is incredibly jarring to listen to. Part of the problem is that, compared to the rest of the cast, he comes across vocally like a trumpet in a string quartet; very loud and overpowering. The majority of the problem, however, is that he suffers from the same flaw as the casting of Jack Nicholson in the film The Shining; while he's perfect for the end of the show, he's playing the end at the beginning, and thus there is no evolution. There is no sexuality coming across in his songs, and thus, you have no idea why Queenie would be attracted to and put up with him. On the other hand, in the Lippa version, Brian d'Arcy James is sheer perfection as Burrs and comes across as a James Dean-ish "Wild Man" who, while dangerous, is very attractive and compelling." --Talkin' Broadway Sound Advice "Patinkin, who used to deliver heartfelt performances, seems here to have taken his cue from his own overwrought rendition of "Buddy's Blues" on the New York Philharmonic recording of Follies. His Burrs is frighteningly one-note, his vocal technique has turned to mush, and his "homage" to the great Al Jolson is -- quite simply -- terrible. Can the Jolson estate sue for defamation of character?" --Review of The Wild Party CD, operanews.com "Mandy Patinkin as Burrs is seething with self-loathing which spills into his song and dance routines. His intensity burns like a beacon through this dark musical. Australian film star Toni Collette conveys Queenie's hunger for love disguised as a thirst for thrills. Her singing voice is expressive as well. We also get ghostly lighting from Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, colorful costumes by Toni-Leslie James, and a haunting set from Robin Wagner. This is the wild party you want to see." --backstage.com "This is a show of star-turns. There are even vaudeville placards to indicate successive entertainments. Mandy Patinkin, as Burrs, is more over-the-top than usual. He even menaces the audience. --Loney's Show Notes
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