As actor and singer Mandy Patinkin was reviewing setlists for his 2019 concert tour, he realized something. As much as he loved the songs he’d sung then, that selection wasn’t what he wanted to sing now.
“It was a bit darker because the times were a bit dark then,” Patinkin said. “It was a set that I really loved, but nonetheless it was dark. And then we went to sleep for three years for the pandemic.”
So Patinkin and pianist Adam Ben-David went back to the drawing board.
“I said, ‘I don’t want to do what we did before,’” he said. “I really want to welcome us all back to the living. I want it to be fun for me and fun for the audience. So let’s put the other one in a drawer and let’s go over the 14 or 15 hours of material I have in my repertoire, and some new stuff as well.”
Patinkin and Ben-David have embarked on the Being Alive tour, which takes its name from the Stephen Sondheim song in the musical “Company.”
Patinkin is best known for his work on screen in films such as “Yentl” and “The Princess Bride” and television series such as “Chicago Hope,” for which he won an Emmy, and “Homeland,” for which he was nominated four times.
But his work onstage, especially in Broadway musicals, is even more acclaimed, earning a Tony Award for the original Broadway production of “Evita,” and two more nominations for “Sunday in the Park with George” and “The Wild Party.”
All of that, Patinkin said, is simple storytelling.
“What I do is tell stories,” he said on a call from his home in upstate New York. “I’m not the genius who wrote these wonderful songs, these gifted men and women from Sondheim to Queen to Randy Newman and, you know, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, Tom Waits. The list goes on.
“They’re storytellers, and that’s what attracts me,” Patinkin said. “I’m very lyric-driven. I’m a story guy. I’m the mailman, I just deliver the mail.
“And it’s great comfort to me to be with company, so that I’m not alone listening to these stories.”
The medium is the mess
Patinkin knows you can go online and see which songs he’s been singing in concert this year. And he kindly asks you not to.
“I don’t like to say it because I do change my mind sometimes,” he said. “I change it literally during the concert on occasion. I don’t want people coming a long way, thinking, ‘Oh, I want to hear him sing that,’ you know. It says he was gonna sing X, Y and Z, and then you get there and he didn’t sing that.”
So just trust him, and enjoy whatever music he and Ben-David end up performing, he asked.
“Nothing’s planned,” Patinkin said. “From the time I begin a song to the time the song ends, that part is rehearsed and we know that. But I don’t have, like, a set patter.
“You know, it’s a complete mess,” he said, laughing. “Other than when a song begins to when the song’s over. Then the mess takes over, then another song begins.”
So come, enjoy the music, and the time spent together in the theater, he said.
“We’re a gregarious species and we need to be together, not alone,” Patinkin said. “We’re not supposed to be sitting on the couch alone. You know, you can do that every now and then, but you do it all the time, you’re in the toilet.”
Life and light
Joseph Papp, the late theatrical director and producer and founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, was a father figure and close friend of Patinkin.
Patinkin was on the road singing when Papp died in 1991. But Patinkin’s wife, the writer and actress Kathryn Grody, spent time with Papp before his death and witnessed a moment that sticks with Patinkin still.
“Joe was laying on a couch at a friend’s house before he passed, just resting, and friends gathering,” he said. “And all of a sudden he sat up on the couch and everyone got quiet and leaned into him to see what he was going to say.
“He looked around the room, wide-eyed, she said, and he said, ‘I see life everywhere in everything.’ And then he laid back down, and soon after that, days later, I think, he passed on.
“That statement she shared with me, ‘I see life everywhere in everything,’ is a guidepost to my existence,” he said. “It is an action to be taken, looking for that life, fighting for that life and light, in good times and in bad.
“It is what I set out to do when I walk in front of a camera or microphone or an audience, whether it be a television show, a movie or play or a concert,” he said. “I’m looking to find that life in my loved ones, in my community, in my world. Sometimes it’s a challenge. But we’re better off when we’re doing it together.”
It was thrilling to return to the concert stage in the fall of 2022, a reminder of his long-held feeling that if he could do only one of the things he does, it would be singing to live audiences.
“It’s immediate,” Patinkin said.
