An Hour With Danny Kaye
Special #1 Reviews

“Danny Kaye: Better Late Than Never”
Only the Camera Cramped His Style
Eugene Register-Guard – Oct. 31, 1960
By: Fred Danzig (Of the United Press International)

           NEW YORK (UPI) – After breaking in his act for 20 years, Danny Kaye got reckless Sunday night and brought a portion of it to the television screen.
            I think he was ready for TV long before this and he didn’t have to wait so long. I haven’t forgotten that TV is where George De Witt kept a show going for years.
            “An hour with Danny Kaye” on CBS-TV was a grab-bag stuffed with assorted bonbons. Kaye’s git-gat-gittles were as fit as a fittle.

GENEROUS HELPINGS
            The face that launched a thousand riffs gave us the works—the wonderful, wild smiles, leathery yells, dark frowns and pursued lip prissiness. There were generous helpings of his graceful footwork as well as his two-left foot tumbles.
            Kaye’s versatility, show-cased by routines that have been polished to a gleaming finish through the years, is so sturdy, so completely professional and inspired that he had little trouble sweeping through the hour in quick time. There was a superb pace and spirit to the show. There were two or three lags—most notably a flamenco dance number and a take-off on “Small World”—but by any TV standard, it remained a superior tour de force.
            If the hour wasn’t completely satisfying it is because of TV itself. Kaye’s non-TV stage presence is so expansive, communicative, open-hearted, that the camera’s limitations kept it from being completely unfurled. Kaye’s stage-girdling prances conveyed the command to which I’m alluding when picked up by a retreating camera at the start and finish of the show. It was through the heavy use of close-ups, while playing to the TV audience, that we lost the full-length artistry of the man.

ONE GUEST STAR

           Kaye, however, showed he could work with this unfamiliar medium as he kidded the cameramen and commercials soon after starting the show.
            His one and only guest star, Louis Armstrong, came along for a rousing song that somehow ended in triumph despite the disparate approaches to jazz singing exhibited by the two performers.
            Unfortunately, the sound track in the “Satchmo”—Kaye number, as well as in others, was unusually bad. The splicing of the tape might have been less obvious at times, too. And I would have found it all a bit more relaxing if Kaye didn’t do so much hair-patting, brow-mopping and handkerchief-waving. We TV viewers are generally tolerant of such manifestations of tension. We take Sid Caesar, cough and all. But I would like Kaye to settle for just one idiosyncrasy, not deluge us with three.

 

“Kaye Makes TV Debut With Wonderful Show”
The Montreal Gazette – Oct. 31, 1960
By: Bernard Dube

           Danny Kaye finally came to television as a performer last night, one of the last among the more prominent American entertainers to take the plunge. With the exception of a number with the infectious Louis Armonstrong, it was an all-Kaye hour, including the commercials, and the result was a richly diverting show, full of fresh and rollicking humor.
            Kaye who has all along been wary of the medium, looked fully in his element and made the program an intimate showcase. There was only one man but there were several characters on view as Kaye demonstrated with great comic effect his command of accents and mimicry and his talent for hilarious satire.
            The show’s main numbers included an inventive spoof of TV programs and commercials, a rousing duet with Armstrong of “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In,” a zany sketch about a zany Viennese psychiatrist. (“A neurotic is someone who knows two and two make four, but he can’t stand it”) and a riotous flamenco dance number.
            In the TV spoof, Kaye enumerated to the music of Partridge in a Pear Tree, the variety of offerings he found “on my brand new shiny TV.” In brief sketches showing what he found, he turned up in several comic roles. He was a Siamese dancer in a wet wash commercial, a finger-painting master with a Salvador Dali string mustache, and on an interview program “Itsy Bitsy Titsy Tiny World,” he was seen as four famous chefs in Tokyo, London, Paris and Vienna squabbling intercontinentally over how best to cook a chicken.
            The latter was the comedy highlight of the show, serving to display Kaye’s wonderful ear for accents. His Paris chef sounded wonderfully like Maurice Chevalier.
            In at least half of the show, Kaye worked with bright new comedy material, written in part by his wife Sylvia Fine who also produced the show.

- Home -