Mandy Patinkin and "Leading The Fun"

L.A. Times February 4th -- Daryl H. Miller reviews Mandy Patinkin at the Kodak Theatre.

One passage of the review seemed particularly apt for An Uptempo and a Ballad:

"Yet what was increasingly apparent was how comfortable in his skin Patinkin appears to be nowadays. He is a prickly perfectionist, but he seems finally to trust himself and his material. He doesn't oversell, as he did in the days that earned him a spotlight parody in "Forbidden Broadway" as "Super-Frantic-Hyper-Active-Self-Indulgent-Mandy." Aside from occasional indulgences in showy, chesty, buzzing-with-vibrato fortissimos, Patinkin spent most of the concert in focused stillness, suspending notes -- softly, tenderly -- in his impossibly high, pure upper range."

Keyword: Stillness -- if you have a spare minute, take a look back to my October posts.

For the last few months, I've been telling students to "lead the fun" in performance.

If your mantra is, "I am the leader of the fun," your audience will pick that up and trust your leadership. If they're going to heckle, they might as well leave, right?

If you abdicate your leadership of the fun, choosing instead to "push the fun up a hill from behind," it all becomes work, obvious work, and no one has any fun at all.

"Pushing the fun up the hill from behind" is a performer waiting for the audience to start having fun first.

It's a long wait...

It doesn't matter if you like to sing big and loud (omg; "showy, chesty, buzzy"!) or soft and quiet ("impossibly high, pure upper range").

Mandy Patinkin was just leading the fun.

Own yourself, you own the stage.

Lead the fun, the audience follows.