Broadway buddies: Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin

NEW YORK - "Are you holding your stomach in?" asks Patti LuPone.

"Yeah. Can't you tell?" replies Mandy Patinkin.

"Are there crumbs on my face? I like to eat while driving," LuPone adds.

Two of Broadway's most durable and beloved performers are posing for photos, and reminding you they are, on a certain level, just folks - well, show folk - full of fear and anticipation for their forthcoming show, An Evening with Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin, playing Tuesday through Oct. 29 at the Prince Music Theater.

Both have resumes among the most eventful in Broadway history: Just in the last few years, she had Gypsy at the City Center, Sweeney Todd on Broadway, and Passion on PBS; he did Sunday in the Park With George and Follies in Concert plus movies and television. Now they're between projects: He abruptly left the TV series Criminal Minds in July; she's waiting to see whether Gypsy will be reprised on Broadway this season.

The "Evening" in their show title is something they've thought about for five years, since a hastily assembled one-off appearance in Texas. Rehearsals began in April, in anticipation of some West Coast appearances in January. When Patinkin broke with Criminal Minds (more on that later), he says his first phone call was to arrange what became the Philadelphia run - the show's first outing in what they hope will be decades of joint appearances.

The question is: What are they up to? It's definitely not a concert.

"You tell me!" Patinkin exclaims.

Components include not just songs, but entire scenes from South Pacific, Carousel and Merrily We Roll Along, in roles they did in high school and are too old to play now (he's 54, she's 58) - but not too old to sing. Two numbers are choreographed by Ann Reinking, of Chicago fame. Each song flows into the next without applause points for approximately an hour in each of two acts.

Their signature songs are there. But in the middle of their South Pacific scene, they'll slip into "Loving You" from a very different show, Stephen Sondheim's Passion. At the end of the first act, they're singing "April in Fairbanks" from New Faces of 1956 - an oddball item that could come only from the encyclopedic mind of Patinkin's longtime pianist/collaborator Paul Ford, who accompanies them.

The answer to the what-is-it question never came in more than an hour spent at a Lincoln Center Theater studio - 40 blocks down Broadway from where Patinkin lives, and a two-hour drive from LuPone's home in Kent, Conn. But certain traumas were relived, dating from their first meeting in 1979 in a show-biz war zone known as Evita, where both made their names, she in the title role, he as Che Guevara.

Inquirer: Both of you are such emotionally intense performers. Being on the same stage, do you worry about overkill?

Patti LuPone: I think Mandy and I are a great balance together. It's organic. . . . The two of us could do Evita tomorrow. Better than the first time.

Mandy Patinkin: We feel safe with each other. We feel safe to be violent or to be calm. To be black or white. Or every color. We just feel safe. If she wants to be extremely dangerous, you can only be dangerous with another actor if you feel completely safe. If you're holding back and thinking everything through 30,000 times, you don't have any instincts coming out of you.

Inquirer: My guess is that the staging is loose enough to allow for creative accidents.

M.P.: It's in those accidents that the gold comes. And if something is right, we know that instantly. We were 20-something when we met in Evita. And when we're together now, there's a part of us that's still in our 20s.

Inquirer: But how is it, reliving those times?

P.L.: It was a cruel experience for me . . . a tough company. My alternate was Eve Harrington if there ever was one.

M.P.: We went out to Los Angeles for the [out-of-town] opening and she was feeling the pressure.

P.L.: It was the first time I'd done a sitzprobe [sit-down rehearsal]. We weren't miked. Nobody told me not to sing out.

M.P.: She lost her voice.

P.L.: I went to a doctor who said, 'Your vocal cords look like raw hamburger meat.' And we were going to open in five days.

M.P.: We didn't know how to protect ourselves.

P.L.: Boy, did we not!

M.P.: Then Patti comes to me and says, 'Look at this, doll!' It was some newspaper column . . . saying that they might replace her. . . . I knew the only thing Patti needed to do was calm down and relax. This is the moment that I remember: I went to her dressing room and she was very 'don't come near me, no one should come near me.' I closed the door and said, 'We're not leaving this room until you know that I'm your friend.' We held each other and let out all the things we were afraid of.

P.L.: Nobody has ever done that for me, before or since. I don't have many friends in the business. But I would lay down and die for Mandy.

M.P.: People in the arts have a heightened sensitivity to the human condition. I don't think that it's a blessing. I could deal with a little less 'heightened.' One of my great journeys and struggles has been to manage my fear, to not let it override reason.

P.L.: I'm scared all the time. Not just in show business.

M.P.: . . . One of our deep connections is our unconscious understanding of each other's fear. When I put myself in her room in Evita in 1979, it's because the only person I knew of who was capable of being that frightened was myself. And for one split second in my life, I wasn't frightened, and I was able to hold her.

Inquirer: Amid such inner turmoil, what keeps you going?

P.L.: The fear. I think it's universal.

M.P.: Without it, you're a piece of wet toast.

Inquirer: But it sounds so hard.

P.L.: We have talent. We can do it. Speaking for myself, I don't know what else to do.

M.P.: It calms me more than anything. It [work] is my battlefield. I'm not a workaholic for no reason. I'm a workaholic because I'm calmer there.

P.L.: The other day I needed time at home . . . and I found myself flipping channels, not knowing what to do. This sounds pathetic. I have a wonderful life. But I wonder what will happen when I can't do it anymore. I'll have to develop a hobby. This is my hobby.

M.P.: In certain arts, you can do it until you drop dead. You may not sound the way you want. But George Burns, I loved him in his last croak.

P.L.: It takes a lot of everything to remain in this business. A lot of love, fear, it takes a lot of joy, creativity, opportunity . . . Mandy and I have been blessed by being actors as well as singers. We're able to go do a TV show, and come back and do Broadway.

Inquirer: And Mandy has used concerts to fill the gap.

M.P.: We've tried to do 25 to 30 concerts a year.

P.L.: I wish I could do 25. Who's your agent?

M.P.: The grass is always greener. I see Patti just did Sweeney and Noises Off and [at the Los Angeles Opera] Mahagonny. I look at what Patti is doing as a more balanced, healthy course that I aspire to.

Inquirer: What happened with your most recent TV show, Criminal Minds? According to some news reports, you just never reported for work.

M.P.: I can only say what's in the press release: creative differences.

Inquirer: But I see you're singing "Franklin Shepherd Inc.," which skewers the West Coast show-biz commerce mentality.

M.P.: That's my way of commenting. I can't think of a better way to say what I have to say right now.

Inquirer: In years past, you had a gap in your voice. You don't now.

P.L.: I had a vocal cord operation in 1994 and had to learn to sing all over again. Before, I was shutting down my throat. I'd walk onstage and stop breathing, which is very common. I muscled [through] Evita.

Inquirer: What about the songs' emotional content?

M.P.: All of these songs show different stages of a relationship, attempts or failures. You know a hell of a lot more about that ride at 54 than you do at 24. That wisdom allows us to be freer with our youth and our age. We're not making it up. We've lived it. It's not pretend.