That Old Feeling: Stoked!

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His next two numbers, “Make Someone Happy” (of course: it’s Mitchell’s mission) and “The Best Is Yet to Come” extend the mood of love in bloom and promises to be kept. Most of the songs he has chosen from the Great American Songbook are teasingly implicit. They suggest sex through love; the lyricists’ indirection kindled the listener’s illumination. Another Porter song, “Love for Sale,” is one of the few oldies that didn’t tiptoe around its subject but strolled right in. It’s meant to be sung by a woman, and is usually performed as a call-girl’s dirge. But Mitchell gives it a jazzy, larkish attack, as if he were the most irrepressible pimp on a midtown street finding new ways to sing, “Check it out!” Another sighting of the “happy” motif.

The evening isn’t all jollity. In “How Long Has This Been Going On,” you get a taste of Mitchell’s low-register power and sexiness, and, on the final note, the surprise of a perfect high note. Then he swings across the spectrum to do a jazzy tandem of My Fair Lady songs, as arranged by John (then Johnny) Williams for Shelly Manne’s big band. Mitchell gives a supple crooning cares — you’ll say it’s like Al Jarreau, I say Billy Eckstine — to “I’m an Ordinary Man.” With “Show Me” (another song written for a woman), he exchanges the fiery taunt of the original for a tone of encouraging adventure: I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. In this two-song jazz festival, he swaps licks with the able, artful reed man Lawrence Feldman (sitting in, the night I was there, for Lou Marini). The other excellent sidemen are pianist-arrange Mike Renzi, bassist Bob Crenshaw and brushman Bruce Williams.

Two numbers Mitchell sings as a kid — Joe Raposo’s “Bein’ Green” and the Bruce Hornsby “Hooray for Tom” — going for innocence without getting cutesy. He graduates to fatherhood, tender and unsure, with Maury Yeston’s “New Words.” A medley of standards (“The Very Thought of You,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Embraceable You” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light”) parades the Stokes range. A few times, when this baritone enters tenor territory, he gets a bit reedy on the high notes. But like the superb actor he is, Mitchell knows how to build to a climax. On several of the songs he ascends confidently to extravagant, beautiful final notes. It’s like the end of a wonderful voyage, with the Twentieth Century Limited gliding into the old Penn Station.

He says, “Time for the last song,” and the audience choruses a pouting awwwww. “Don’t worry,” he adds, “I have an encore planned.” Mitchell began the set with a song that anticipates casual, impromptu sex. He ends with a Bernstein-Comden-Green tune from On the Town: “Some Other Time”, a ballad of pre-coital, never-to-be-coital regret: “Haven’t had time to wake up / Seeing you there without your make-up. / Oh, well, we’ll catch up / Some other time.” In an hour, we’ve matured from anticipation to disappointment, from fling to flung.

TO DREAM

It’s a most expert, engaging hour. Still, in the aspects of his vocal work that Mitchell has chosen to display, there’s the sense of power withheld, of a lion determined to prove he’s a pussycat. That could be simply an actor’s canny assessment of the venue. His voice can expand to a heroic roar, filling and thrilling the 2,500-seat City Center. Here his chops are domesticated, as if he’s gauged the exact level of volume a 150-seat night club requires. Or, as my cafe society doyenne, Mary C., said, why blow the roof off a small room on the ground floor of a hotel? There are folks sleeping upstairs.

Then Mitchell returns for his inevitable encore, “The Impossible Dream,” which he sang twice a night for nine months in his La Mancha engagement. You know the song; it builds from a whisper to a righteously proclaimed shout, an orgasm of idealism. Cabaret connoisseurs, like The New York Observer’s Rex Reed, would have Mitchell skip his signature tune; to sing “The Impossible Dream” in such a jewel-box setting, Rex wrote, is “to throw bananas to the monkeys.” Okay. The song is corn, it’s schmaltz, and it never made me cry until I heard BSM sing it. Again, here, the rendition is thrilling. By the end he has dropped his mic; no amplification needed for that magnificent voice. Mitchell has unleashed the baritone beast. The lion will not sleep all night. And neither, for a few minutes, will the folks upstairs.

In truth, they may not know there’s a singer beneath them. And they probably don’t know who he is. Fewer than 3,000 people will see Mitchell in this three-week stint. One of the most potent singers in America has yet to release a solo album. And though at 46 he is an almost star on Broadway, he was seen by many more people 25 years ago, when he was plain Brian Mitchell (he added the Stokes, his mother’s maiden name, to distinguish himself from the other six Brian Mitchells on IMDb) and played Jackpot Jackson on Trapper John, M.D. He stayed with the show for its seven-year run, then free-lanced on TV, where his credits include Additional Voices for A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (1988), Captain Planet and the Planeteers (1990) and I Yabba-Dabba Do!& (1993). In a miniseries about tobacco heiress Doris Duke, he played surfer dude Duke Kahanamoku. He supported Angela Bassett in Ruby’s Bucket of Blood. He never had a movie role big enough for his character to have a name.

Stokes’ middling Hollywood career was a blessing, for he could leave it to reach the unreachable star. Now, he’s almost there. He’s played some of the best roles in the musical repertory. I’ve got a few more he could inhabit and ennoble: Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, Kean in Kean, Curly (or possibly Jud) in Oklahoma, the King in The King and I (though he’s vocally overqualified for a role that is mostly speak-song), Sid Sorokin in The Pajama Game, King Arthur in Camelot — virtually any musical male lead but the one in Hairspray.

I can think of something else that would make this someone happy. What is a gifted young composer were to write a great new role for this one true king?

I can dream too, can’t I?

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