The great English comedian and song and dance man promised a look back in humor of his career and we got that but not quite. By which I mean, when you are spending 105 minutes singing and dancing about your career, you are gonna miss some stuff. Jim Dale missed his entire movie career ; he didn’t mention anything he did with the “Carry On” crew. Hattie Jacques, Sidney James, Kenneth Williams: these are legends of comedy and he doesn’t even mention them in passing.
Instead he talks about “Pete’s Dragon”.
What interest Dale is his earliest career in British Dance Hall (for 160 years the entertainment of the working class in the UK) and his two big Broadway hit. “Barnum” and “Me And My Gal”, He pads the show with old (I mean Old) jokes and set pieces, one about how Shakespearian language is now part of the vernacular being especially good. Even his audio “Harry Potter” books doesn’t much interest him. The story he tells about recording the first book has nothing to do with Potter at all and except for explaining where he found the voices for a couple of characters, the subject matter doesn’t interest him.
At least it doesn’t interest the 78 year old man the way his earliest moments interest. He looks back at his first two years in Vaudeville with a great deal of pleasure, returns to those early moments throughout the evening, and in the man you can clearly see the boy.
A perfect rendition of “Georgy Girl (Dale wrote the lyric, Dusty’s brother Todd Springfield wrote the music) isn’t help with a silly story about two gangsters being in the room the first time he played it for “Georgy Girl’s director. Again, he is descending to schtick and indeed, by then it was reminding me of Davy Jones solo show: it was a sort of extended one liner.
There is only so much you can complain about a 78 year old man performing for nearly two hours without a break and not losing your attention. And songs as good as “Georgy Girl” and “Dick-A-Dum-Dum” are performed very very well, a slowed down so you can hear the lyric to “Museum Song” are nothing but purely pleasurable.
So yes, I recommend it to a degree. As human living, breathing history, as a connection to the 1880s, as musical theater. But as an insight into the greatness that is Jim Dale? That you won’t get.
Grade: B
