BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL - BRIAN STOKES MITCHELL
Brian Stokes Mitchell is the Great White Way’s Great White Hope: an ethnically mixed, movie-quality leading man with a heavenly baritone; a performer with enough appeal to make a new generation love theater. So his self-titled debut album was a logical first release for the newly formed Playbill Records. The track listing reads like a Broadway best-of with some American standards thrown in for fun. But Stokes, who also arranged most of the 12 songs, doesn’t perform them in the traditional way. High-drama stage anthem “Being Alive” is slow and dreamy with a Spanish guitar solo; another Stephen Sondheim standard, “Another Hundred People,” is mashed up with jazz standard “Take the A Train.” It’s a different take on the same old material by an artist capable of doing it in the expected way. Which, depending on who you ask, is either inspiring or disappointing. Billboard
