It's #tonyawards season, and this treasure of the American Theatre is nominated again. @companybway is right across 45th street from us at @dearevanhansen and I am reminded of our time together every time I walk out the stage door. #Pattilupone was so good to me. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you mum!” . Watching old performances can make an actor cringe — it's clearly late in our run when my show had gotten overly fussy — Doyle would no doubt have thought I was "gilding the Lilly." . "Not While I'm Around" was never a sweet lullaby for me. It was a warning — from a too-close-talking, quasi-feral, wary, lethal (“I’ve got ways...”) yet guileless street urchin with animalistic survival instincts, not smart, but not dumb, in our case developmentally arrested — a warning to his "mum" that there was a serial killer living upstairs. . “Demons will charm you with a smile, for a while, but in time...” The fermata there seemed like an ellipsis to me, something unspeakable hanging in the air, that " in time... they may kill you too.” But he can’t bring himself to, so all he can repeat is: “Nothing’s gonna harm you.” . Also: how weird was this production? I’m in pajamas, I express my suspicion of Mrs. Lovett’s attempt to reassure me by... playing Steve’s brilliantly dissonant countermelody on a violin while we’re sitting on... a sort of wooden sawhorse. . What I see most is just how focused, attentive, and generous Patti is. No matter what I wanted to try, she unfailingly reciprocated. The maturity and poise of the actors is mirrored in the characters. One full of diffuse energy, rushed, unsettled, fidgety, the other still, in total control of her prodigious faculties, a master class of economy and distilled intention, piercing like a laser. . It occurred to me watching this that Tobias Ragg and Evan Hansen (currently so richly embodied by another former Toby, our extraordinary @zach_piser) are kindred spirits of a sort: awkward, well meaning, eager-to-please loners “adopted” by a mother they want to save. And my 2022 Larry Murphy owes a lot to what I learned from Patti in 2006 — how to simply listen to a young person struggling to connect.