“Danny Kaye Is Really A Circus by Himself”

Oakland Tribune – Mar. 30, 1958

By: Theresa Loeb Cone (Tribune Drama Editor)

Earlier this month during one of their performances, the musicians of New York’s Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall were helpless with laughter as they faced their guest conductor. He rapped his baton for attention. “Are you always laughing like this?” he asked. He mimed incredulity.

The response was a guffaw-muffled “No,” of course. Usually these gentlemen face Dimitri Mitropoulis. At that moment they were accepting direction from a lanky, six-foot redhead named Danny Kaye.

It was all part of a gag, naturally. Kaye had agreed to “conduct” a benefit performance. And much to the amusement of audience, music critics and musicians, Kaye comported himself with customary hilarious abandon. He included in the antics, between some random attempts at serious conducting of light classics, spur of the moment imitations of easily recognized conductors whose individual styles were familiar to music devotees.

Versatility

This was another demonstration of the Kaye versatility. Conducting large orchestras (and he has led several, as a matter of fact) offers just another means of expressing his comic talent which, in my opinion, hasn’t an equal in this country today.

Although he has been active in vaudeville turns, has been abroad as a serious United Nations ambassador-at-large for UNICEF helping to secure medical and food supplies for the world’s underprivileged children, it’s been some time since Kaye has appeared in a movie.

That’s a situation about to be corrected this week at the Paramount when that theater opens “Merry Andrew,” the first Danny Kaye movie in two years. The film, incidentally, was previewed last night. In it Kaye portrays an English school teacher who by chance one night substitutes for a circus ringmaster and finds he wants to abandon academic spheres for pungent sawdust arenas.

Figuring prominently in this decision is the fact that he has developed a yen for circus performer Pier Angeli. In the course of the comic sequences Kaye sings some melodies with his customary charm.

Revolving around him in the story are Noel Purcell, Robert Coote, Salvatore Baccalori and Patricia Cutts. She, you may recall, if you saw last year’s local presentation of “The Matchmaker” in which she played the handsome milliner, is a statuesque blonde of more than ordinary beauty and talent.

Although fans may not remember having seen Danny Kaye as a ringmaster in any of his previous movies—despite his immense popularity, the 45-year-old comedian hasn’t made more than a dozen to date—he came into the limelight performing as a ringmaster on a New York stage.

The year was 1941. The show was “Lady in the Dark.” And the Kurt Weill song which whipped Kaye into genuine fame was the one about Russian composers, which brought down the house every night it was performed.

Enunciation

As a figment of Gertrude Lawrence’s imagination in a “circus” number, Kaye merrily and flawlessly enunciated 52 Slavic names beginning with “Malichevsky, Rubenstein, Arensky and Tschaikowsky, Sapellnikoff, Dmitrieff, Cherpnin, and Kryjanowski,” and getting slightly more complicated with each successive word.

Although the credit for putting Brooklyn-born Kaye on Broadway goes to his appearance in Cole Porter’s “Let’s Face It,” which had another interesting star in its cast, a young singer named Mary Martin who was doing something special with a number called “My Heart Belongs To Daddy,” it was “Lady in the Dark” that brought Kaye to the attention of a large number of talent scouts.

He had been performing as a singer, comedian and dancer ever since he was pushed out on the stage as a child of five. In his years of learning his trade, years which included traveling the famous eastern Borscht circuit, making vaudeville appearances in London and Paris, touring the Orient with a show which left San Francisco in 1934 under the somewhat weird title, “Le Vie Paris,” Kaye learned to speak enough Japanese to get around in Japan, and developed his remarkable flair for imitating languages.

No one who saw him at the Curran in his personal appearance in 1952 is likely to forget his local triumph. Critics especially won’t forget that he volunteered to give an extra benefit performance in an already heavy schedule to aid a local drama critic who had been very seriously injured in an auto accident.

It was a unique gesture in this country (or any other for that matter) to have an actor spontaneously and generously come to the aid of a critic.

He is now about to break his long standing rule of making only one picture a year. To make up for the lapse of two years away from the studio, Kaye has been working on another movie to be released shortly. He undertakes a serious role in “Me and the Colonel,” based on “Jacobowsky and the Colonel,” a story originally told by the late Franz Werfel. And soon to be started is another movie, “The Five Pennies,” a biography based on the experiences of trumpeter Red Nichols.

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