“An evening of mayhem…”

The Vancouver Sun – Feb. 22, 1982

By: Jamie Portman (Southam News)

Comedian Danny Kaye says there’s no experience to match the “neurotic sense of power” he enjoys when conducting a full-size symphony orchestra.

And Kaye—a man who can’t read a single note of music—exercised this power to the hilt Saturday night when he faced the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and led it through a two-hour performance before a capacity audience of 2,800 in the Orpheum Theatre.

As a benefit concert aimed at raising $120,000 for the financially troubled VSO, the event was a smash success, with patrons shelling out as much as $200 a ticket to see Kaye clown his way through an evening’s entertainment. Kaye has been doing these concerts for more than 20 years and in the process has raised more than $5 million for orchestras.

The comedian loped on stage with a bundle of batons, the first of which he sent flying into the air when he fumblingly raised it to cue the orchestra into an entrance. He finally extracted a single opening chord from the musicians—and then stopped the music while he took an extended bow.

Kaye went on to convulse the audience with a demonstration of a decrepit old conductor struggling to reach the podium. He conducted Rinsky-Korsakov’s The Flight Of The Bumblebee with a fly-swatter. He made faces. He wandered into the audience while the orchestra continued to play. When his microphone fell to pieces, he noted that it was made in Japan and turned it over to a Japanese member of the string section to repair.

It was an evening of mayhem. But it was also an evening of music—Strauss, Leroy Anderson, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven—some of it managed surprisingly well under the direction of the world’s most celebrated musical illiterate.

The main impression left by Kaye’s whirlwind visit to Vancouver on the weekend is that he wasn’t kidding when he told a Friday afternoon press conference that he really does relish power.

Both at the concert and at that preceding press conference, the 69-year-old Kaye left no doubt who was in charge.

He just barely tolerated the pinning of a flower on his velour pull-over by an admiring lady from Surrey, and then ordered the assembled reporters to move closer to the platform.

Instead of waiting for questions, he asked them. “Could I have your names? Where were you born? I’d like to have your blood types.” Did he have a statement to make? “Only presidents of countries make statements—usually apologetic ones.”

He grimaced through stock questions he’d obviously been asked a hundred times before. No, he had no unfilled ambitions. No, he had no desire to go to the moon. In surveying his life, what did he feel proudest about? “That I’ve been able to stay alive this long.”

What made him really proud, he confided at one point, was that he still had a sense of curiosity. Remaining curious, he said, ensured an “interesting life. I honestly believe I’m as curious today as I was when I was a very young boy.”

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