There really is only one Mandy Patinkin and love him or loathe him, you really can't ignore him. Last night's press night for his quickie run of 9 performances at the Duke of York's saw him go into memory meltdown during that notoriously tricky Stephen Sondheim number 'Franklin Shepard Inc.' from "Merrily We Roll Along". "Those of you who know me", he said, "will understand that I will stay here all night until I get this right." Oy. His bemused pianist - the remarkable Ben Toth, standing in at the eleventh hour for Patinkin's usual collaborator Paul Ford - could only smile benignly since his music didn't carry the lyric (as if he didn't have problems enough). "Call Sondheim", someone from the audience helpfully suggested. "Sing something from 'Company' instead", added another. But while we shifted uneasily in our seats (it's a fine line between sympathetic amusement and all-out embarrassment and we'd crossed it) Patinkin stopped and started, took time-out, head-in-hands, at the piano, and kept at it until I, for one, really began to wonder if it was all an elaborate set-up. Patinkin, the method actor, has after all turned performance informality into an art and since he's an obsessive perfectionist I wouldn't put it past him to want to share that - to show us how tough it is being up there!

But, as I say, there are no half measures with Patinkin - it's all or nothing - what you see is what you get, you share the risks and the anxieties; and whilst there were moments when I didn't want to hear one more note delivered in that strangely disembodied falsetto (now laden with vibrato), there were others when his total engagement with a lyric gave me the proverbial shivers. He sang a lot of Sondheim, giving the lie to the idea that those songs don't stand alone but only work as an integral part of the dramas they inhabit. Patinkin reminds us that like all great songs, Sondheim's connect with many different moods and contexts. One final thought: how many performers sing "Being Alive" like it's a fantastic privilege?

If you haven't watched this, then you should. It's a testimony to hope and unity in the world, yes, but it's also a moving endorsement of raw and untapped talent the world over. Watch old grandpa and the guy from Amsterdam - nobody taught them to dig so deep into their souls...

In no particular order....

English National Opera: "Riders to the Sea" - Fiona Shaw's "quietly devastating" staging of Vaughan Williams' one act opera; a fitting tribute to to the late lamented Richard Hickox who did so much for the cause of English music.

English National Opera at the Young Vic: "Lost Highway" - stunning David Lynch homage.

Royal Opera: Strauss/von Hofmannstahl "Elektra" - an exceptional revival which simply dug deeper into the subtext of this dazzling shocker. Extraordinary work from conductor Mark Elder and a brave, intensely human, performance from Susan Bullock.

Stravinsky "The Rite of Spring"/ London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vladimir Jurowski - one of those rare performances that totally re-evaluates a modern classic.

Daniel Barenboim/ Beethoven Sonatas on the South Bank - challenging, dangerous, sublime. Truly an event. Who says great performances don't transcend technique?

Schubert "Winterreise"/ Alice Coote/ Julius Drake at Wigmore Hall - the amazing Alice Coote crosses sexual boundaries to search for personal truths in the winter of discontent.

Honourable mention: the sexy and talented Anna Netrebko storming the Royal Opera as the sickly and impassioned Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata". Can she build upon her prodigious gifts or will she succumb (as so many do) to international stardom and become yet another fashionable side-show? We shall see.

Rarely do the arrangers and orchestrators of stage musicals get their dues in print. Until relatively recently there wasn't even a category for them in the annual Broadway Tony Awards. So here's something for Sarah Travis, the arranger and supervisor of the latest import from the miniscule Watermill Theatre at Newbury where the only way to stage musicals at all is to have the cast double as the band. We've seen and heard several examples of her cunning reductionism - most notably the John Doyle directed Sweeney Todd - but this latest incarnation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's best score (well, I for one am certain of it), Sunset Boulevard, is arguably the most successful. If anything her ingenious instrumentation intensifies the sepia, other-worldly quality of ALW's music, lending the key themes a more fragile ephemeral quality. Even the show's most cinemascopic moment - the moment Norma Desmond returns to the studio and is hurled into the spotlight once more - creates the illusion of opulence from only a handful of instruments, the harmony at one point transfixed by a single violin sustained above the stave. That moment, incidentally, magnifies the great song in the show - the stonking "With One Look" - and achieves an emotional uplift that few other Lloyd Webber tunes manage to quite the same degree. As Norma Desmond herself says (and Kathryn Evans is a whisker away from turning herself into a durable stage diva this time around) "I am big. It's the movies that have gotten smaller". So have the shows - but nobody appears to have told Sarah Travis. Good on her. 

Sondheim aficionados will note that Trevor Nunn has reinstated one cut number - "Silly People" for Madame Armfeltd's manservant Frid - in his excellent revival of the master's A Little Night Music at the Menier Chocolate Factory. It's a strange, somewhat bitter, digression that briefly but boldly shifts the perspective on to the serving classes and points accusingly at the self-indulgent folly of their social betters.

But the ever practical Sondheim and his collaborators felt that at this point in the show the audience weren't interested in gaining insight into a peripheral character. Seeing it reinstated, I'm not so sure. But that's the joy of Sondheim shows - reappraisal perpetually renews them. To know them better is to love them all the more. And something else is becoming clearer with the passage of time: that the sharpness of their observation thrives on the closest scrutiny and actively benefits from a more intimate presentation.

Remember how A Little Night Music was lost without trace in the wide open spaces of the National's Olivier Theatre? Put simply, we couldn't get close enough to the people, and people - real people truthfully portrayed - are what Sondheim shows are all about.

It must be the first time in the history of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel that the actress playing Nettie Fowler has top, above-the-title, billing. True she gets to sing "June is Bustin' Out All Over" and 'the football song', "You'll Never Walk Alone", but it's a tiny supporting role. Then again, folks, it is Lesley Garrett, ' the nation's favourite soprano', that we are talking about here and in these celebrity obsessed times is it really surprising that her name is writ larger than the authors themselves? Still, at least she's turning out for eight shows a week with no alternate this time around and that in itself is proving to be the exception rather than the rule these days. Time was when it would have been inconceivable for the star of any show to do less than the full eight shows. The star and the public wouldn't have stood for it. Some roles are especially taxing, we are told. Tell that to Patti LuPone who is playing Mama Rose in Gypsy eight times a week on Broadway right now. There is no more taxing role in the repertoire - and I think she's missed one performance in a year. They don't make 'em like that any more.

So with that in mind I wonder how the great British public feel about the announcement that their choice for the role of Nancy in Cameron Mackintosh's revival of Lionel Bart's Oliver! - Jodie Prenger - won't be doing Wednesday and Thursday evenings? They've already announced, too, that Rowan Atkinson, the star of the show, will be taking a holiday less than three months after the official opening. These days there's a lot of homework to be done before you book tickets.

And Carousel (now playing at the Savoy)? A pretty average out-of-town show - though graced with a touching performance from Alexandra Silber as Julie Jordan. The show, and arguably the most achingly beautiful score ever written for the Broadway stage, carries you along - but the West End deserves, indeed should demand, better. Interesting that it took a subsidised theatre - the National - to do it proud last time around. 

Allow me a shameless plug, friends, for my ongoing English National Opera and London Philharmonic Orchestra podcasts. You can reach them by way of the Indy Online, of course, or Itunes, or by simply visiting the websites in question. Essentially they are fully-fledged radio programmes designed to take you behind the scenes and explore the thinking behind the creativity. How did Fiona Shaw and her cast arrive at the beautiful and emotive staging of Vaughan Williams' Riders to the Sea (which opened last night - see my Indy review)?; what makes the extraordinarily eloquent Vladimir Jurowski, principal conductor of the LPO, tick? What exactly prompted his programming for one of the most adventurous LPO seasons ever? This is priviledged access to the people behind the performances. It sharpens the perceptions no end. Give it a try.

 Will Self's pointless and oh, so tired swipe at the physical attributes of the main protagonists in the Royal Opera's sensational revival of Strauss' Elektra ("Heavyweights in the House" Evening Standard 25/11) was yet another instance of writer and editor spectacularly missing the point. If they spent half as much time learning about the realities of opera as they do propagating the same old ignorance we'd all get somewhere. Clearly Self has no idea how few sopranos have what it takes mentally, physically, vocally, to sing the highly challenging role of Elektra - no more than a handful in the world at any given time. Susan Bullock rightly triumphed at Covent Garden uncovering layers of text through subtleties of colour not often heard in performances of the role. In the face of such a detailed and moving portrayal how churlish, then, to harp on about the absence of "sunken cheeks" and the fleshier forms of these heroic women. Perhaps an inaudible Katherine Jenkins might satisfy his casting requirements. In your dreams, Will.

                                                                                           

Good to find Rolando Villazon looking and sounding so relaxed as the ardent and well-lubricated Hoffmann in Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann after his near-disastrous innings as Don Carlo in the Royal Opera's synthetic Hytner production. Singing that role was always a bad idea, the more since well-publicised vocal problems had inevitably led to a crisis of confidence. I will always remember Jose Carreras telling me that the one big regret of his career was allowing Herbert von Karajan to persuade him to sing Carlos. Once was more than enough. It is longer and heavier than it appears and to a lyric tenor like Villazon embracing it to the full is potentially suicidal. One of Villazon's great qualities as an artist is his unstinting commitment: he will push well beyond his comfort zone if that is what is required. But his charm, as we heard here as Hoffmann, lies in the soft velvety "cover" of his voice, his caressing way with dovetailed phrases mezza voce. The "push" of his voice is exciting only when he is singing within its natural bounds. Let sanity prevail - he is too big a talent to lose to bad decisions. It's true that Domingo sang Hoffmann, too; it's grateful to sing and not too high. But only a handful of roles (and this is one) sit just as comfortably for two very different kinds of tenor.  

For collectors of operatic idiosycracies, the current revival of the so-called Zandra Rhodes “Aida” at English National Opera has thrown up a real humdinger. In two runs of performances now Claire Rutter has made an extraordinary impression in the much-vaunted and highly challenging title role. She sings the role with great subtlety, finesse, and imagination, making light of the extraordinary difficulties and reminding me, at any rate, of the number of times I have heard major international singers come a cropper in it - not least the notorious Nile Scene where Verdi sets hurdle after hurdle for the lyrico spinto soprano. Rutter didn’t receive nearly enough credit for her achievment, some commentators even suggesting that she had too light a voice for the role. Honestly, some people need a crash course in the basics of vocal fachs. The good news, though, is she is learning the role in Italian for her Australian Opera debut. But she could sing it a lot closer to home than down-under - anywhere in the world, I reckon, including the Royal Opera (take note).

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Imagine this: the title song of a new musical set in the Warsaw Ghetto without a single Jewish inflection. And the composer’s name is Shuki Levy? If ever a show cried out for a Klezmer band this is it. Remember that marvellous National Theatre piece from a decade or more ago – Ghetto? Now there was a show born of a peoples’ music. Whatever happened to the indigenous musical score? Whatever happened to songs that were – in style and character – thoroughly integral to the subject matter? I can think of only a handful in recent times: Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, Jonathan Larson’s Rent, and Adam Guettel’s miraculous Bluegrass inflected Floyd Collins. We can probably blame the worldwide cult of Les Miserables for what I would describe as the “Europop power score” – nothing wrong with it in itself (there are some rather terrific numbers in Les Miz) other than the fact that its colossal success has spawned a whole generation of clones – the generic musical theatre score.

So should we be retitling the newly unveiled Imagine This: Les Schmiz? This is a show with a sound idea and lots of good intentions. But it has a dreadful first act and the real inspiration, the real kicker to the solar plexus, comes too late in the second. Interestingly enough, the turning point, the moment that my level of engagement dramatically shifted, was the principal character Eleazar’s Tevye-like moment of truth – beautifully played by Peter Polycarpou. Ok, so it was straight out of Fiddler on the Roof but at least it bore more than a passing allusion to Jewishness. Plenty of Jewish jokes in this show but what about Jewish songs?
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