an evening with Patti and Mandy! -small review and song list

How will there be room for an audience with those two egos in the room?

Meow.

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I must get to this concert!

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I'd love to see them perform some EVITA material.

Oh, boy!

My wallet is crying!

I absolutely refuse to buy a ticket for this until I've read PatiB (That's how she's known to her theater pals)'s review.

Where Pati goes, the crowd flows.

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If you're fvcking with me I will stab you! (I highly doubt you are but I just had a heart attack and I will cry if it's not true)

I'm so there! I'll probably go to two or three performances!

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I thought they REALLY disliked each other

Didn't you pay attention to what Velma told Roxie? Showbiz is the one place where that's NOT a problem!

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I seem to recall that working with Mandy was one of the few things Patti enjoyed about EVITA.

I absolutely refuse to buy a ticket for this until I've read PatiB (That's how she's known to her theater pals)'s review.

Is she really going to review it? There must be Wildhorn songs included.

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Updated On: 8/13/07 at 10:36 PM

Masochistic?

Wrong way 'round, if the stories one hears are true. It's more like sadistic.

I would love to see this. I wish it was in NYC

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So I saw the show last night, and let me just say it was superb!!
I witnessed two consumate professionals doing what they do best: Entertain.

The conceit of the show was the Patti and Mandy were singing as a couple in various points of their relationship in the first act, so while the songs were disjointed, they all had to do with relationships.

The second act was more of the greatest hits section. they did selections from Evita, Gypsy, Follies, Carousel, and others. The thread of relationships was still in this act, though not as stronly woven.

The evening was at times uplifting, funny, charming, heartbreaking, and mesmerizing all at once. They both seemed to have gotten only better with age. Patti was endearing and exhilerating to watch, and Mandy was nothing but captivating with his strong baritone and his unorthodox, but compelling choices.

Mandy was not "somewhat overindulgent" as I thought he was going to be. He was only a tad overindulgent, but it didn't turn me off.

Highlights include: in act 1, they did the entire scene from South Pacific that starts with "A Cockeyed Optimist" and goes through "Some Enchanted Evening reprise".
in the Second act they did the entire bench scene from Carousel.

In both of these cases, I was completely mesmerized. I thought to myself, now THIS is how you act in a Rodgers and Hammerstein scene. The dialogue is old, and everytime I've seen a scene from either of these shows, I've been bored out of my mind, but these two seemed to breathe new life into the dialogue, and for once I cared about the characters. It was simply stunning.

This is in part to Ann Reinking's tactful and able direction, where she shows her prowess in how to make a musical scene come to life without any sets and hardly any props; just two fantastic actors, and a bench. She also masterfully directs through most all of the numbers, making all these seemingly disjointed songs make sense together to form one coherant whole.

The costumes by Ann Hould-Ward were stylish and appropriate, though a little frumpy on Patti, and the lighting by Eric Cronwell was subtle and touching.

other Highlights include:
-the opening number, a duet of "another hundred people"
- Patti's rendition of "Getting married today"
- a wondefully funny song called "april in fairbanks" choreographed on rolling office chairs
-Patti's "Don't cry for me, Argentina"
-Patti's "some people"
-Mandy's "Somewhere that's green" and "Everybody says Don't"


*song list to come shortly*

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Updated On: 10/26/07 at 02:21 PM