Pictured Above: Mandy Patinkin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.

“Being Alive” Connecting with Mandy Patinkin

By: Lori Goldstein

Mandy Patinkin–award-winning theater, film, and television actor–shares stories with Music Features writer Lori Goldstein about his singing career in the theater, on recordings, and his “first love.”

If you’ve seen the film, The Princess Bride, you know him as the avenging swordsman Iñigo Montoya.  If you’ve seen the Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park With George, you know him as the French pointilliste Georges Seurat, or as Che Guevera in Lloyd-Webber’s Evita.  More recently he has appeared as CIA agent Saul Berenson in the acclaimed television series, Homeland, acting alongside Claire Danes, “one of the most extraordinary privileges of my professional life.”  Since Mandy Patinkin has excelled in these different entertainment genres, it may be surprising to learn what his true professional love is. “If you told me there’s only one thing I can do…I would absolutely say the live performance venue with music. There’s nothing like it, you’re with the audience, it’s just the best place on Earth to be.”

On February 14, 2025, that place will be Princeton’s McCarter Theatre, host to Mandy’s solo show, “Being Alive.” He and accompanist Adam Ben-David, with whom he has collaborated since 2015, will present their favorite Broadway and American classic tunes, along with personal anecdotes and a little Yiddish thrown in for good measure. “I sing these songs because I’m a story guy. I love the stories, and I always refer to myself as the mailman. I’m not the genius; the genius are the men and women who wrote these words and music. I’m just the mailman who delivers it.  No matter what the weather, I’m there.”

The Broadway stage was where Mandy first displayed his vocal agility. In 1980 he won a Tony for his portrayal of Che Guevara, opposite Patti LuPone, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. “We became friends forever during the [run of] Evita, states Mandy. “Then the concert we created to do with each other, that we did for over ten years, was just heaven on earth. It simply doesn’t get any better than that. I’m always, always looking for anything that we might be able to do together.”

 “The theatrical pinnacle for me,” says Mandy “was working with Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Bernadette Peters, and the whole company of Sunday in the Park with George. The musical premiered in 1984 and won the Pulitzer Prize. “It was a seminal experience in my existence,” says Mandy, who recalls that the cast began performing it in previews at the Booth Theater—but without a complete second act. “To quote my wife, ‘people were leaving in droves’ because we didn’t have an ending, and it was hard for us as performers to tell a story when we didn’t know how the story finishes.”

Pictured Above: Mandy Patinkin – Sunday in the Park with George. Photo Credit: Contributed.

Mandy knew that Steve was at home trying to write. But one day, Steve came to Mandy’s dressing room and sat on the couch. “I took him by the shoulders and I shook him. I said, ‘Steve, write us anything, even if it’s a piece of s—t, write us anything so we can try it,’ and he blubbered ‘Yah-yah-wa-wa—okay!’ And then on a Wednesday, he comes to us and hands Bernadette [the song] ‘Children and Art,’ and he hands me ‘Lesson #8.’ We go downstairs, it’s played for us, and then they [Stephen and James] ask us if we’d be willing to put it in the show tonight, hours later. We said we will. And that happened to be the night that Frank Rich [theater critic] of The New York Times had come. And it was so exciting because those two songs tied the whole piece together. And what it did to [all the] actors, like dominoes going backwards, it injected them with a kind of energy and clarity…I think that was the most extraordinary experience I’ve ever had in the theater. That moment.”

“After we closed Sunday at the Booth Theater, we were all gathering downstairs at the bar,” Mandy remembers. “Stephen said, ‘I guess this was an interesting experience for you.’ I said, ‘It was maybe one of the best experiences of my life.’ And he said, ‘For me, it was like all the others, because it’s just about the process. Maybe different for you, because it was the first time you were part of the process from beginning to end.’ I said, ‘Maybe, but it was extraordinary to me.’”

Pictured Above: Mandy Patinkin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.

Ten years later the cast would sing the concert version of the musical at the St. James Theater for Actors Equity Fights AIDS. Afterward, Mandy said to the composer, “’Do you remember, Steve, at the Booth Theater, when you said this piece was just like all the others for you?’ He said ‘Yeah.’ I said, “Do you know how full of s—t you were, now?’ He shook his head and squinched his eyes the way he did, and he understood. He knew that this was most unique, even for him. And when he wrote his two anthology books, he named each of them, one of them called, Finishing the Hat and the other called, Look, I Made a Hat—both from the song that he put into the preview on that night that he handed it to me, ‘Finishing the Hat.’”

Mandy also recalls the first time Steve played “Finishing the Hat” on a piano in the downstairs performance space of a café. James Lapine, conductor Paul Gemignani, and Mandy were there. “He was a nervous wreck, nervous beyond description. When he finishes playing the song, he’s sopping wet, the sweat was like makeup people had come in and poured it all over him. And he looks up, and he looks [at us] and tears are streaming down our face[s]. He’s terrified, and we can’t believe what we just heard. And then I put [the song] in that night and the audience went insane. And was it ever like that for me after that night? Nope. Nothing compared to that first moment. And I’ve often thought about the first time you make love to someone you really love, or meet someone you really admire, you only get that first time once.”

“I think when it comes to Steve, and why I have such a love affair for his whole body of work, and what he gave all of us, to me he was the Shakespeare of our time, and I also love Shakespeare. I think what Sondheim and Shakespeare often did was that they took the darkness that they saw in the world or felt in their souls, and they turned it into light.” What Mandy also finds in Sondheim’s genius is “the simplicity of Shakespeare. What I mean by that is, it can mean almost anything. It is so simple that it can relate to all of us on many, many levels of our existence, in the present moment of our lives—personally, communally, globally—any way you want to look at it.”

Having recorded 11 solo albums, Mandy still marvels at how his vocal career began. “This music thing is not what I planned. I went to [The Juilliard] School to be a classical actor, that’s what I was trained to do.” It was January 28, 1986, the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. Mandy was in London, singing the role of Lt. Joseph Cable in a recording of South Pacific for CBS Masterworks. He was cast along with José Carreras, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Sarah Vaughn, though they all recorded their parts separately.

At the end of the recording sessions, the late Joseph Dash, who was General Manager of CBS’s classical music division, asked Mandy if he’d like to make his own record. Mandy replied, “Wow, somebody a long time ago told me you’re not allowed to do that unless you’ve been on the road for a hundred years.” Joe said, “Well, I’m asking you to do it.” So Mandy and Paul Ford, who would become his accompanist for three decades, released Mandy’s self-titled album in 1989, which included songs that simply “spoke to us, they didn’t have any theme.”

When the South Pacific album got a lot of attention, Mandy wasn’t sure of what to do next. Some people told him he should go on the road and start performing; the Shuberts told him he should have a 50-piece orchestra. Mandy was content with singing in his studio apartment with Paul playing on the upright piano. In 1989, over Shabbot dinner at Mandy’s, Joe Papp, his director at The Public Theater, said he wanted Mandy to play Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, along with Christopher Reeve, Alfre Woodard, and Diane Verona. He also asked Mandy about his album, and Mandy said he was reluctant to begin a solo singing career.

He told Joe, “Everybody wants me to do it, because I’m from Broadway, with a big orchestra and dancing girls. I don’t want to do that.” Joe said, “Well, you didn’t ask me. Listen, you do Leontes for me, you’ll have eight shows a week and Monday nights off. You’ll have six Monday nights, you can do it [sing live] on your six Monday nights on the same stage.” “That first Monday night came and I did it and I loved it,” recalls Mandy. Joe said, “I guess you like doing that.” “Yeah, Joe, I did.” And Joe said, “Okay, but I want you to keep doing the classics at the same time.”

Mandy went on to play Prospero from The Tempest and a few other Shakespeare roles, but he admits that “the music took my life over because I just loved it.” Over the years, he has traveled all around the country and the world to sing songs that tell the stories most meaningful to him and his audiences. “My goal as a communicator, as an actor, as a singer, as a storyteller, is to connect,” says Mandy. “My favorite word in the language is ‘connect.’ If there’s a tombstone and anything written on it, I’d like it to say four words: ‘He tried to connect.’ And my feeling about that is, I think all of us long to be with individuals or experiences, whether it be art, or music, or a speaker or a scientist, or a friend, a partner, or a child—the thing we want most out of it, I believe, is feeling that we’ve connected, that we’ve listened to each other, that we’ve heard each other. We don’t need to understand it all, but we’ve tried to connect. And that’s the gold ring to me.”

Pictured Above: Mandy Patinkin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.

Mandy made the connection to his Jewish roots with the album Mamaloshen (Mother Tongue), released in 1998. He’s quick to point out that, except for one song he remembers from his father, the Yiddish songs on Mamaloshen are not ones he learned growing up. (His father spoke Yiddish only to his grandmother whenever he helped her with personal financial matters.)  Joe Papp, who was a father-figure to Mandy, was the reason Mandy learned his second Yiddish song. One day, Joe called him to say he was doing a benefit for the YIVO Foundation, the Yiddish Archival Institute of New York. Joe wanted Mandy to perform a Yiddish song, and Mandy told him he didn’t know any. “Well, it’s about time you learned one,” and he sent over a person to teach Mandy a song. “Ironically, Joe had a healthy ego. The song was called ‘Yosel, Yosel,’ which meant ‘Joseph, Joseph.’”

Before he performed it, a black-and-white film of the towns in Poland where Joe and his relatives were from was shown. Since Mandy was standing behind the screen, he could watch it while the audience did. “When I sang that song, ‘Yosel, Yosel,’ I’d done a lot of songs in shows that I’d been in, and already I’d learned a lot of songs for the concert tours I was preparing, but nothing hit me the way that music did.” Under the tutelage of the Milotek family, Yiddish experts, they translated some English songs like “God, Bless America” and “White Christmas,” by Irving Berlin; Berlin’s first language was Yiddish, yet he never wrote a song in Yiddish.

When Richard Avedon photographed him for the cover of Mamaloshen, Mandy asked if an American flag could appear behind the black-and-white photograph of him, because he “was an American Jew singing about my ancestry. But I wanted it to be about all Americans, all immigrants.”

The musicians who recorded the album with him, and especially the African-American and Asian-American musicians, told Mandy, “We’ve played on every one of your albums, this was the best experience we’ve ever had.” When Mandy asked them why, the response was “It just hit us in a way that you can’t talk about.” After performing the Mamaloshen songs many times and receiving praise from audience members of diverse religious backgrounds, Mandy realized that “what people were responding to [was] to allow your ancestry to wash over you…whether you’re Jewish, African-American, German, Italian, or Polish—wherever you’re from, let the sounds of your ancestry come into being. You don’t need to understand what the words mean…”In many religions and different denominations, they just sing notes, they don’t sing words, they want you connected to the sound of being.”

These days Mandy stays connected to ‘the sound of being’ when he, as well as his family, practices daily meditation. He’s a Jew-Bu, a Jewish-Buddhist, who was educated in Buddhism by his wife Kathryn’s brother, the late Senior Monastic Michael Choke Yukon Grody. “We loved him dearly, and he had a great influence on all our lives. If you said to me, what was that influence, it’s to try to be in this moment, literally, not think about the past, not think about the future. Right here, right now. That’s why I love the live concert venue. It is the most Buddhist example of [what] a performer can have to cherish.”

Pictured Above: Mandy Patinkin. Photo Credit: Joan Marcus.

Mandy is reluctant to tell me the setlist for “Being Alive.” “I pick a song because I like the story. Some of the time the songs are silly, sometimes they’re profound, sometimes they’re just like, how do I wake up to a nice day and not waste it, and how to have fun.” When I ask him why he titled the show after a song from a Sondheim musical he wasn’t in (Company), he answers, “I think it’s a very glorious poem put to music. It speaks to me, it speaks to my children, and I believe audiences like the song and the story too.”

He promises that there’s no politics in the concert. “We’re all human beings, and if you breathe, the air is political. I really try not to make it an evening of politics, it’s really constructed for both myself and my audiences as a respite from all of that noise that we hear so often.” And for those who didn’t know Mandy can sing, that know him from TV, film, or even the Facebook and Instagram videos one of his sons Gideon is posting, he says, “Give it a shot, we’ll have a good time. I can’t guarantee anything, [except] that I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

Mandy reminds me of his lifelong mission. “What I go out and do in front of every camera, every scene I film, in front of every audience I sing to—I go out there to try to connect, and what I connect to is to tell you the story, and how I connect to the story. The guys or ladies who wrote it did not write it for me, they wrote it for some other reason. The fun of it for me is finding my reality, my history, or my imagination—what is it that I could invent that connects it to what they wrote. And I let those two things float together and they support each other. I don’t have the words, but I have how I want it to be connected.  And that exercise connects me to being alive.”

Tickets to”Being Alive” on February 14th are available at mccarter.org.