After a short, sparkling overture from pianist Paul Ford and bassist Andrew Shaw, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin were under their respective spotlights on Wednesday. Sondheim's Another Hundred People was the ideal launchpad for an evening of sharp vignettes from the Great White Way.
LuPone and Patinkin's seasoned acting skills
counted a hundredfold in extended episodes from Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific and Carousel. Songs flew past like suburbs on a bullet train ride; between them, LuPone and Patinkin plucked flesh-and-blood characters from Hammerstein's beautifully written pages.
LuPone may have admitted in interviews that she was a little elderly to play South Pacific's Nelly Forbush but, on the night, the tentative romance between the island-bound nurse and the plantation owner was especially poignant.
The evening made much of songs ending up where you least expected them, and one of the niftiest came when the couple effortlessly slipped from the flirting duet of Baby It's Cold Outside to Stephen Sondheim's Everybody Says Don't.
They also rescued wonderful, witty songs like April in Fairbanks from being mere footnotes in the Great American Songbook, this one leading to a pas de deux on swivel chairs that ran from a touch of chair-bound Apache dancing to high kicks.
And it was Sondheim's music which supplied the real substance of the show in a sequence from Merrily We Roll Along. Introduced by a snatch of Land of Hope and Glory, these songs were, to put it mildly, tricky, but Patinkin, in particular, was in staggeringly good form. True, there was some thinning in the singer's upper register and, later, his If I Loved You was disturbingly rough in tone; yet his virtuoso turn on Sondheim's The God-Why-Don't You Love-Me Blues was breathtaking, especially when he took off on a one-man duet between "Buddy" and "Margie".
There was less self-conscious technique in LuPone's art. When she belts, she belts and Everything's Coming Up Roses was none the worse for it. (Earlier on, as a nod to her distinguished stage career, Don't Cry for Me Argentina had unfortunately lost some of its former bloom.) Yet how gracefully she stamped her own personality on that testing Kander and Ebb ballad, A Quiet Thing.
Without a doubt, Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin will be remembered for some time for giving us a privileged glimpse of what the Golden Age of Broadway was and is all about.
