Like many one-trick actors, he seems to have a standard performance that he gives in each show. Having seen him in
Grey Gardens,
A Catered Affair,
West Side Story, and now
Death Takes a Holiday, I really cannot differentiate between the performances. It's the same vocal inflection, the same posture, the same attitude. I agree with Theater Trash. He has a song in
Death Takes a Holiday that is written to be a show-stopper--although it really doesn't have much to do with advancing the actual plot of the show--and he turns it into five minutes of pure boredom.
His voice isn't all that impressive, either. He does have a huge vibrato, and when he sings in straight tone, his voice becomes incredibly small and thin. Even in a theatre the size of the Laura Pels, you get the impression that he would have trouble projecting without a microphone. Really, I don't get him or his popularity at all.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body