Danny Kaye and Co.

Danny Kaye is not only brilliantly funny but unusually charming. He makes entertainment out of nearly anything. Yet he has--out of generosity or misplaced admiration--given the first chunk of his program to a bunch of appallingly faded vaudeville acts. Since Mr. Kaye is offstage when they are on, nothing salvages the first hour of the show. One can only arrive late.

Spanish dancers strum and stamp indignantly, looking furious at each other but, as Signor Kaye points out, looking even more furious at the floor. They clatter and glare, brandishing boots, tight pants, short jackets, scowls, and women. They seem to be fairly intact imports of the gypsy dancers who currently perform for American tourists in Spain, and for all their energy they are a typically tired vaudeville act.

So are the chimpanzees that follow. They pout. They bicycle. They smoke. They applaud themselves. I have nothing against chimpanzees--they are certainly more amusing than their glowing trainer--but they belong to jungles, zoos, or classrooms. On stage, although they fit into the vaudeville world neatly, they merely prove that run-of-the-mill vaudeville deserves to be left in its grave.

The final non-Kaye act is put on by a skilled ventriloquist with three or four voices, who is a more polished vaudeville star than any of the others. He lasts until about 9:30.

Then there was Kaye. He took old songs and new twists, jokes, casual conversation, tall lines and short lines, even a few serious lines, and captivated everyone in the audience. He did not really have enough material, but he rarely has. He imitated the Spanish dancers, did a takeoff on a German opera singer; and subsequently got the audience to add sound effects and choruses to songs. He grimaced, danced, and double-talked in an inimitable, much imitated manner.

One of his sequences involved The Actor's Studio and Stanislavski--"who made me the genius I am today. In one word he summarized to me the secret of success in dramatics: suffer." To Kaye, Stanislavski says, "Think before you stink."

Kaye later imitated a yogi. "If you have a navel, contemplate it. I contemplate it. I hate it." He also turned the house lights on, sat on the edge of the stage,, and chatted with the audience.

Back on his feet, he performed old hits of his such as his racing tongued show-stopper from Lady in the Dark, "Ugly Duckling" from Hans Christian Anderson and "Anatol of Paris." The audience was enthusiastically ready to doubt him when he interrupted at one point to say, "there is nobody living in the entire world who likes to hear me entertain better than me."