Brian Stokes Mitchell "Plays With Music - Holiday!" @ Feinstein's - New York City Article

Brian Stokes Mitchell
“Plays With Music - Holiday!”
Feinstein’s / 54 Below
254 West 54th St
Through Saturday November 23

A Brian Stokes Mitchell show is always an event, and this is one of his best. He titles it “Plays with Music - Holiday!” in that most of the program is taken from his new album Plays with Music, which is primarily show music (as befits the greatest Broadway baritone of his generation) but that he saves room for a few seasonal songs as well. As with Melissa Errico a week ago, this is an epic show, one that bears seeing more than once; there are at least half a dozen numbers that bear description at considerable length: he opens with “There’s No Business Like Show Business” at first completely out-of-kilter and off-meter, but gradually settling a groove, rising in key and excitement, and then the first holiday number is a rather intricate Christmas collage that pivots around “The Christmas Song,” set in a very catchy jazz-waltz time that the late Mel Torme would have approved of. Next comes “Madrigal,” a brief, lesser known air from Camelot that, while not exactly a “verse,” serves to lead into “If Ever I Would You Leave You.” He delivers this classic baritone ballad with a combination of sincerity and self-deprecating humor, making a rather droll spectacle out of addressing it to at least four different women in the house, one for each season. Then there’s a completely sincere and understated “Hello, Young Lovers,” including the verse, slightly adjusted to accommodate a man singing to a woman, which is contrasted later with “The Man I Love,” sung as originally written, with all pronouns intact, in honor of marriage equality. There are set pieces galore: “Gesticulate” (Mr. Mitchell and the late, much-missed Marrin Mazzie truly shined in the 2006 Encores! production of Kismet), that, as the song suggests, truly sung more with the hands and torso than anything else, and, another feat of vocal virtuosity, “Getting Married Today” (from Company) in which he performs two roles, a jittery bride and a boozed-out bridegroom, at the same time. Spoiler alert, and, much as I hate to ruin the surprise, the piece de resistance of the whole evening is in fact, a holiday song, wherein his voice somehow drops a few octaves and he descends into basso register to essay “You’re a Mean One, Mister Grinch.”

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