Brian Stokes Mitchell at Alice Tully Hall Brian Stokes Mitchell, accompanied by Marvin Laird, performing at Alice Tully Hall. Brian Stokes Mitchell wielded his stand-up microphone like a sword on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall, and the audience happily fell on it. That swashbuckling gesture, during his rendition of "Man of La Mancha," added an extra flourish to a dramatically all-encompassing performance that conjured the illusion of a lavish semi-operatic production. But in fact there were just two musicians on the stage: Mr. Mitchell, and the pianist Marvin Laird, a last-minute substitute for Tedd Firth. The stunning concert, spun off from his spare voice-and-piano album, "Simply Broadway," was a benefit for the Actors Fund, of which Mr. Mitchell is the chairman. It was also a christening for the Adrienne Arsht Stage, Alice Tully's main hall, newly named after a generous donor. Mr. Mitchell commands a singularly thunderous baritone whose size matches the egos of vainglorious stage characters like Don Quixote from "Man of La Mancha" and Lancelot from "Camelot." Unfurled in layers to uncover a feral growl at its bottom end, the voice accomplishes what no amount of heroic preening and posing could achieve. You tremble before its visceral impact. More important, you believe in these guys. Few other Broadway baritones have such vocal resources. If Mr. Mitchell were a ham, he would exploit his gift to play crowd-pleasing tricks. But he is as meticulous an actor as he is a singer, and everything he does is in the service of his material. His facial language, from imperious sneers to comic eye rolling, was precise and persuasive. Heightening the contrast between Mr. Mitchell and the formidable characters he impersonates was his ebullient sweetness between numbers. When he was just being himself, Mr. Mitchell radiated genuine happiness, gratitude and concern for the victims of Hurricane Sandy. That bonhomie seeped into his performance of "How to Handle a Woman," from "Camelot," with the gentle crooning of the words, "love her, love her, love her." And it enhanced the broad comedy he brought to "If I Were a Rich Man," from "Fiddler on the Roof," and "It Ain't Necessarily So," from "Porgy and Bess," which he treated as an audience call-and-response. With the exception of Javert's song "Stars," from "Les Misérables," a stiff piece of schlock that no voice could infuse with much life, Mr. Mitchell made each song a detailed character study. Especially impressive was his "C'est Moi," Lancelot's self-adoring anthem from "Camelot," inflected with just enough humor to keep the character from seeming insufferable. "What Kind of Fool Am I?" from "Stop the World - I Want to Get Off" was scaled down enough to expose the self-doubt at its core. Mr. Mitchell found the precise moment in Billy Bigelow's "Soliloquy" from "Carousel" when the fantasy of fatherhood deflates with anxiety. With the words, "But my little girl gets hungry every night/And she comes home to me," he suddenly realizes he has to put food on the table, and pride turns into panic. Like everything else in the evening the transition was carried off with grace and understatement.