Ellen's Mandy Patinkin Page |
LIVE! March 1998 |
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KEEPER OF THE FLAME |
HE SINGS AND ACTS, THEN HE ACTS AND SINGS. GIVE MANDY PATINKIN A STAGE AND THERE’S ALMOST NOTHING HE CAN’T DO. Make a list of memorable leading men who could sing or memorable singers who could act. Astaire. James Cagney. Bing Crosby. Nelson Eddy. Al Jolson. Danny Kaye. Gene Now make a list of those working today: "If I were forced to give up either singing or acting;" he says in his New York City apartment between bites of fruit salad straight from a Tupperware container, "I'd give up acting, because I'm already acting when I sing." Patinkin, 45, made his name in musical theater in 1980, when he won a Tony for playing Che Guevara in Evita. He bolstered the recognition in 1984 with a Tony nomination for his role as George Seurat in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George and solidified his acting credibility with an Emmy for his role as the intense Dr. Jeffiey Geiger in the 1994-95 season of Chicago Hope. Were he to stop acting today, however, posterity might remember him best as the dueling Spaniard in Rob Reiner's wacky fairy tale The Princess Bride, in which he says, ''My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." There was something strangely affecting about the way he said it, his delivery grave and somber, full of love for the slain, not anger toward the slayer, that suggested he knew what it meant to be a son struggling to redeem) his father. Patinkin grew up in Chicago. "My father was in the junk business, which is now called 'recycling,' on the South Side. He died when I was 18, just when I'd started to grow up," says Patinkin of a man who owned every recording of Mame and who, for a bar mitzvah present, took Mandy to Broadway to see Walking Happy at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and Mame with Angela Lansbury. "I was just getting mature enough to be able to know him. He was a wonderfully sweet man, a very kind man. I did know that much about him. If there's any kindness and sweetness in me, I think it's the Jiminy Cricket of my father on my shoulder." Being robbed of his own father explains, in part, why Patinkin chose to leave Chicago Hope after only one season, begging out of a four-year deal that would have brought him more fame and fortune. "My father's death made me acutely aware of time, and the lack of it, and the desperate need to take advantage of the time you have with those you love," he says, referring especially to his wife, actress Kathryn Grody, and their sons Isaac, 15, and Gideon, 11. “There are many people who can do one-hour drama TV and still have a family. For me, because of the size of the part, it meant 24 hours a day, eight days a week, so I never had a minute free to sit at a soccer game and be present for my kid, or be available at the dinner table.” Patinkin's dad, a man whose ability to express himself was limited, may have had another, subtler effect. "My father was an award-winning orator in high school and college, and then, in the army during World War II, he broke his neck. He needed an operation, but they touched the wrong thing and paralyzed him for three years. He taught himself how to write with his left hand, and he taught himself how to walk and talk again. I'd heard tales of this man who was a great orator and sort of a leader, but the guy I knew was very quiet and subdued." The actor's singing style is anything but subdued. Critics used to describe it as over-the-top and histrionic. "What one defines as 'over-the-top' is just my instinctual take on something," he says. "The critics were reflecting on who I was, and that's who I was, sometimes over-the-top. I realized that I should embrace that and be thrilled by it. I never apologize for it anymore." Patinkin may be hammy sometimes, torchy and theatrical, certainly, but above all, he's sincere. He sings with his whole body, nothing hidden or held back, whether he's singing sotto voce or thundering in full chest tone, though his signature sound is a pristine, tremulous tenor that squeezes every note. His new love is concertizing, just he and piano player Paul Ford, bringing songs to theaters across the country. "I'm just a mailman, delivering songs instead of mail," Patinkin explains. "I pick songs that have great stories in them." Patinkin's ninth album, Mamaloshen (Mother Tongue), has just been released by Nonesuch. It's sung entirely in Yiddish but doesn't feature tunes from the typical klezmer repertory. "We do Yiddish versions of 'The Hokey-Pokey' and 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' and 'Maria' from West Side Story and even Irving Berlin's 'White Christmas.' " If that sounds over-the-top, he's also in a new Paul Auster movie called Lulu on the Bridge with Harvey Keitel and Mira Sorvino and will appear in a musical based on Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous next January. Patinkin will be anything, except limited. "Of everything I get to do," he says, "the live concert venue is my favorite. What I love, more than anything, is sitting in a room full of people who also seem to enjoy listening to these great songs, these ideas and thoughts by geniuses like Bernstein or Hammerstein or Sondheim, and it comforts me that I'm not alone." It's hard to say which is most telling, the sense that these are things he "gets to do," the idea that he's listening to the songs when he is, in fact, performing them, or the need not to feel alone. Possibly, the last item. On the list of contemporary singing actors, he is virtually alone, an anomaly. Someday, perhaps, there will be other leading men who can sing. Today, there's Mandy Patinkin. by PETE NELSON |
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