Mandy Patinkin has a new concert that is called Being Alive, except in London, where it is called Mandy Patinkin — Live in Concert. Patinkin is not entirely happy about this.
“You can come to Mandy Patinkin — Live in Concert, but the real title is Being Alive,” he says.
Being Alive is also the title of a Stephen Sondheim song. So it’s Sondheim songs, then? “There’s always going to be some Sondheim in what I do,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “I’m not saying how much.”
We are on the roof of his apartment building in Manhattan. Patinkin is in a baseball cap and khaki shirt, a can of cider on the table in front of him. Behind him, between the tower blocks, there’s the Hudson River and the cliffs of New Jersey.
You may know him as Saul Berenson, the bearded CIA man in the long-running television series Homeland, or as the dashing Inigo Montoya, on a quest to avenge his father in the 1987 cult film The Princess Bride. Or the heartwarming series of videos he shot with his wife, the writer and actress Kathryn Grody, and their younger son Gideon during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. Or for his many turns in musical theatre, or for his concerts, which he likes doing best of all. Even if it seems that he does not like to talk about them.
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I read that at one concert, in Utah, he did Sondheim numbers, Bohemian Rhapsody and the Hokey Cokey. This kind of thing gets out, of course. If you are rudely determined to find out what may be in store for you, “you can go online”, Patinkin says, darkly. “I try not to say what it is. And I change it.”
His reason is that he does not want people coming expecting one thing and getting another. He does not want anyone studying the programme — a problem he eliminates by not providing one.
“I want you there with your eyes closed. Or even half asleep is fine. If you’re half asleep you’re probably listening better.”
I expect he tells a few stories too, I say. He is willing to confirm this. He tells how he met Sondheim. Apparently it’s a terrific story, although he won’t say what it is. “I want people to come to hear me tell the story, and in London particularly, because I know they love Sondheim. You can promise it. The only reason it won’t be told is if I have a brain fart.” He laughs. “And that happens.”
It’s a sunny afternoon, the sky coated with thin scrapings of cloud, and it’s rather refreshing, on a day like this, to meet a chap who doesn’t want to talk about the show he is promoting. Patinkin, 70, sports the same grey-flecked beard he wore in Homeland. “If I shaved right now, I think we’d probably both agree, ‘Well, you just took about 20 years off your life,’” he says. “But then about 20 minutes later you’d go, ‘Maybe three years.’ ”
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He has brought a baseball cap for me too, along with the cider. He thought it was non-alcoholic — in the US cider tends to mean apple juice. But this turns out to be hard cider. Who knows what he will say after a few swigs, he says as we sit down, and I wonder the same thing.
I have interviewed Patinkin once before, and he talked about his childhood on Chicago’s South Side, and losing his dad at the age of 18, and how all of his acting work was an attempt to reconnect with his father. He fell back into the characters he played, he sang, his voice soaring in the little flat above a garage where he was lodging at the time, while shooting Homeland. He did not sound like a man who needed intoxicants to explore his inner landscape.
I think I have a grip on your childhood, from our last interview, I tell him. “Yeah?” he says. “Good. Write it down and send it to me, will you?”
When did he know he could sing, I ask. Sondheim described his voice as “a gift from God”.
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“My personal feeling is everybody can sing,” Patinkin replies. He was in a boys’ choir at his synagogue from the age of seven. “And then on the high holidays I was the boy soprano with Paul Blumenthal, who became an obstetrician.” The old women would come up to them afterwards and pinch their cheeks.
“I heard the older men and the cantor weeping, I heard them cry.” It made him think of Ethel Merman. “It’s the same kind of reach.”
He thinks singing is like blowing the shofar, the instrument made from a ram’s horn, at the end of Yom Kippur. “The gates of Heaven are closing, so you blow it because it’s the last sound that’ll hold before the gates close. So you want your prayers heard before the gates close. And sorry, I think that’s bullshit. Those gates are open 24-7, 365 [days a year], your entire life. You get that shofar out, which is your mouth, your song, your voice . . . Say that prayer. Let it be heard.” He shakes his head. “One day! Give me a break.”
On the evening of the day that Hamas killed 1,400 Israeli civilians, Patinkin was playing Portsmouth, New Hampshire. “I had to walk out in front of a lot of people and sing,” he says. “They embraced me,” and he felt, in their response, “the need to be with each other and not to be alone. I feel that I am in the service business. And the service I have to answer is to bring people together.”
Patinkin trained at Juilliard, and in his twenties he was Che Guevara in the musical Evita, and won a Tony award. Then he was approached by James Lapine, the playwright and librettist, about a show he was working on with Sondheim that was inspired by a Georges Seurat painting. They had written the first act, which was peopled by characters in the painting, “and then they realised that there was a character missing. The missing character was the artist.”
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They wanted Patinkin to play Seurat. Lapine asked him to take drawing lessons and to audition for Sondheim. Patinkin hates auditioning. “I said, ‘I’m not trying to brag, but I just won the f***ing Tony award. Does it ever stop?” They got Sondheim on the phone, and “he said, ‘The only person who doesn’t have to audition for me any more is Angela [Lansbury] . . . I have to hear it.’ ”
Patinkin duly worked himself up into a panic. He appeared before Sondheim at a workshop for the show. They were working on The Dog Song, in which the artist sketches two dogs and imagines the world from their perspective. The dogs sing too, and the original idea was that their voices would be supplied electronically. But Paul Gemignani, the musical director, knew that Patinkin liked doing voices and said: “Mandy could do the dogs.” So they went into a little room, and Patinkin began auditioning, as a dog.
Sondheim listened soberly to his dog voice and then he shook his head. “He goes, ‘No, no, no,’ in his very serious way, he would wrinkle up his face. It’s too Hermione.” It sounded to him too much like Hermione Gingold, the English actress with a famously deep drawl.
• Relative Values: Mandy Patinkin and his son Isaac Grody‑Patinkin
However, Sondheim must have been happy with Patinkin’s other talents. A little later they began testing the first act in an off-Broadway theatre “and all the people in the painting have their parts, and the only person who doesn’t really have his part written yet is the artist”, Patinkin says. “And I’m supposed to get in front of an audience and perform this piece for all these people that are coming, and my part isn’t written. And I was not a very calm person, and I did not know how to handle this.”
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Sondheim was coming too, to work out where he needed to add musical elements. Patinkin remembers being on stage, sitting behind a canvas, while the character who is his mother sings about how Paris is changing. Patinkin sings a bit of it now, so I get the idea. “And I figured, you’re with you mother, you’re pretty frustrated, let it out. And so she’s singing and I’m just bawling . . . I look like a snot machine.”
Sondheim telephoned him later that night. “It was one of the most connected conversations I have ever experienced or had with another human being,” Patinkin says. Sondheim talked about his fraught relationship with his own mother, who had told him, before she died, that giving birth to him was the greatest mistake of her life. “I had a difficult time with my mom. Not quite to that degree.”
The phrase he remembers, from the conversation, is Sondheim talking about how his mother had wounded him, while also giving him “the canvas for his life’s work”. “He said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks, but thanks.’ ”
Sondheim wanted to write a song featuring the artist and his mother, in which “these two ships meet in the night, as opposed to pass and miss each other”. He raises his palms in the air and brings them past one another. “And that was sort of the idea for the song: Mom is here and George is here, and maybe they’d be able to do this . . .” He clasped his hands together. “But they don’t.”
Two days later Sondheim gave him his part. “I got to participate in a conversation that he absolutely transformed into the most beautiful poem, a musical wish for two human beings to be able to connect,” he says.
It was a few years after this, in 1986, that Patinkin began working on a record. A music industry friend had advised him that this meant going on the road for years, playing small clubs. But in 1986, while performing with the London Symphony Orchestra, Joe Dash, a top executive at CBS Records, approached him about it. “I said, ‘Joe, thank you so much for asking . . . I’m not allowed to do that. I got to go on the road and do all this stuff . . . It’s obviously not possible. He said, ‘What are you talking about? I’m asking you to make a record.’ ”
He got together with Paul Ford, the pianist from Sunday in the Park with George. They went to Sondheim’s house, where all of his compositions were stored in a filing cabinet in his office. There had been a fire at his house, Patinkin was told. The filing cabinet was the one thing that survived. They went through hundreds of other songs too.
Joe Papp, the stage producer, suggested that he perform the set one night a week at a theatre that was staging his production of Hamlet, with Patinkin as Laertes. “’You’ve got Monday nights off,’ he said. ‘On your Monday nights, you can try your little music thing.’”
The first night he was terrified. “I wanted to do it so much.” Walking out on to the stage, “I could hardly get a sound out. And somebody — I don’t know if it was Joe or the man on the moon — yells out, ‘Relax!’ . . . And I just started.”
He sang. He talked. “My wife said I never shut up.” His agent approached Grody during the show and tactfully suggested that they might “organise his patter”. “She said, ‘I don’t think he is ever going to have anyone organise his patter . . . He’s just going to do whatever the f*** he wants.’ ” Afterwards, as he sat in the dressing room, Papp came up behind him. “He puts his hands on my shoulders, he is looking at me in the mirror, and he says, ‘Well, I guess you like doing that.’ ”
He has been doing it more or less ever since: his show, whatever it is, and sometimes an all-Sondheim performance called Celebrating Sondheim. Sondheim, who died in 2021, saw him do it at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in 2002. For weeks Patinkin had been working himself up into a lather, wondering if Sondheim would come, and on the last night he gave himself a talking to, saying: “F*** you, Mandy. You’re just a lunatic . . . a neurotic lunatic.” After the show, his wife said: “Steve’s here.” He stood waiting for the maestro in his dressing room, fretting.
“He walks in the room,” Patinkin says, and his voice breaks and he begins to cry. “It was just the greatest moment of my life,” he says, sobbing. “He just fell into my arms and he just wept uncontrollably, and he held me so tight, and I held him. And that’s all I lived for, to make him happy. I worked on this, I loved him for this music and these words and I wanted nothing more than to give him my love for this, and my gratitude.”
The two of them struggled for a while to compose themselves. “I mean, two Jews, completely awash in over-emoting. And he gets it together, and then he kind of looks at me, and he says, ‘You haven’t finalised the recording, right?’ And I said, ‘Right.’ He said, ‘It’s ‘perfect’, not ‘perfect’.”
He wanted Patinkin to stress the second syllable of the word, in a line in the song Beautiful, which the mother sings in Sunday in the Park with George. “He said, ‘Can you change it?’”
Patinkin is “oiling up” another one of those Sondheim shows now. He plans to go out walking after our interview, with his earphones on, listening to himself singing it, to “just get it back in to me”, and singing along to it. By the Hudson River, or in the countryside near his cabin in upstate New York, you may pass him in this state, singing as he goes.
Mandy Patinkin — Live in Concert is at the Lyric, London W1 (nimaxtheatres.com), November 7-19
