Jim Dale (standing) as he appeared at Long Wharf Stage II in the mid-1990s in Giles Havergal's adaptation of Graham Greene's Travels With My Aunt (co-starring Brian Bedford, seated). Dale is back at Long Wharf Stage II through June 24 in his one-man show Just Jim Dale. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.
Just Jim Dale
Workshop production of a new one-man show. Through June 24 at Long Wharf Stage II, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. (203) 787-4282, www.longwharf.org. $30. Starring Jim Dale, accompanied on piano by Mark York.
Jim Dale—whose career spans over a dozen of the saucy British “Carry On…” films, a slew of Disney family flicks in the 1970s, the film version of Spike Milligan’s sardonic Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall and Tony Richardson’s Joseph Andrews—once told me that he saw movies as something he did in between finding great stage roles.
Dale said this to me when he was at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 1994 for a pre-New York run of Travels With My Aunt, in which he played the titular Aunt Augusta in Graham Greene’s outrageous coming-of-middle-age adventure. His stage glories have included the original Broadway production of Barnum (for which he won a Tony), Fagin in one of the best revivals of Oliver! and a 2003 revival of Trevor Griffiths’ tragicomedy The Comedians. This year he appeared in a New York revival of Athol Fugard’s The Road to Mecca, directed by Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.
He repeated the same expression when I interviewed him on the phone earlier this month, in anticipation of Just Jim Dale, the one-man (plus piano accompanist) autobiographical revue he’s workshopping at Long Wharf through June 24.
Even considering the length and breadth of his 60-year career, it’s extraordinary what Dale says he’s had to leave out in order to maintain a fluid 90-minute show.
Basically ignored in Just Jim Dale: all his films. He’s made 30.
“I never wished to be a film or TV star,” Jim Dale says. “My one joy is theater.
But even some of his theater triumphs get short shrift. He also won’t have a chance to mention his previous Long Wharf appearances—not just Travels With My Aunt but Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parades; both shows transferred from New Haven to New York. He will do material from Barnum!, which won him a Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. And he’ll do comedy bits from his music hall days, some of them a bit saucy. He adds, however, “I was not a dirty comic. I was not a blue comic. I was not even a comic.” He did a few years of music hall as a youngster, morphed into a pop star, penned the lyrics to the movie song “Georgy Girl,” joined the esteemed ranks of the Carry On low-brow film comedy ensemble, was invited by Laurence Olivier himself to join the National Theatre Company, worked with groundbreaking playwrights such as Peter Nichols (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg) and wowed Broadway in the crowdpleasers Barnum! and Me and My Girl.
Yet “I never went to an acting class,” Jim Dale says. “I took my experience from Music Hall.” It’s that formative work which ends up providing the main throughline for a life which includes stints as a song-and-dance man, a TV pop star, member of the Carry On film ensemble, lyricist of the chart-topping movie song “Georgy Girl,” member of the National Theatre (invited in by Laurence Olivier himself), actor in tragicomedies by cutting-edge British playwrights of the 1970s, Tony-winning star of crowdpleasing Broadway musicals, guest star in quirky cable dramedies and voice of the Harry Potter books.
For him, live theater continues to trump all the other media he’s explored. Earning an audience’s respect, and especially their laughter, is what continues to keep him returning to the stage, and makes Just Jim Dale an ideal project for this point in his career.
“You’re on your own up there. That’s the joy. I don’t do anything unless it’s a challenge.” A few moments later, he was taking an opposite viewpoint to arrive at the same feeling: “I was just saying to my wife yesterday, being on the stage with this show is like being in the comfort of my own room, with my favorite people.”
Whether it’s a challenge or a comfort, the stage is where Jim Dale belongs. He tells me a story–an anecdote you can’t believe didn’t make the cut for Just Jim Dale—about performing Scapino. Dale co-adapted and starred in the acclaimed slapstick adaptation of Moliere’s Scapino, which was produced in both London and New York in the early 1970s. “I was meant to swing out on this rope over the stage. One night, I went for the rope, and I missed it. I landed in the audience and broke my foot.” He continues to tell the story, which to him is about how he had to quickly reblock the second half of the show because he could no longer do the acrobatics. But what I’m thinking as he tells it is: He BROKE HIS FOOT and he still went on AFTER AN INTERMISSION and finished the show.
Dale isn’t taking the easy way with his one-man show either, though his limbs are so far intact. He anchors the night, he says, with songs and dances. “I’m always tweaking it. I can’t do the same moment-by-moment thing every night. It’s like an amoeba growing.” He’d be excused, I suspect, if he were to take it easier. He’s 77, and by his own admission gets “winded playing chess these days.” Prior to the ten-day Long Wharf run, which opened June 14 and won’t be open to critics, he’d performed Just Jim Dale “about 18 times,” including at the National Cabaret Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center last summer and for neighbors in New York’s Putnam County, where he has a home. At one point, as the show was up to an unwieldy two-hour running time and needed some shaping, Dale ran into Richard Maltby Jr., the producer/director/lyricist known whose Ain’t Misbehavin’ is one of the most deftly assembled revues in musical theater history. (Maltby’s zillions of other credits include rejiggering Miss Saigon and Song & Dance for Broadway consumption, writing lyrics for the musicals Baby, Big and The Pirate Queen, and setting cryptic crosswords for Harper’s Magazine.)
Maltby oversaw the splashy revival of Ain’t Misbehavin’ which opened the 2011-12 Long Wharf season. A few months later, Jim Dale was working with Gordon Edelstein on Road to Mecca. No wonder Long Wharf got the honor of hosting Just Jim Dale’s out-of-town try-out. The show is likely to be the only one at Long Wharf this summer, after several packed summer seasons in recent years. The theater is focused on its mainstage renovations, which will take until fall.
These days, Jim Dale is as well known for his audiobook recitations of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books as for anything else on his extensive resume. He says he got that gig from his Long Wharf appearance in Travels With My Aunt. The audiobook producers figured if he was the star of a show in which only four actors played dozens of roles among them, he should be able to get a handle on the Potter universe—not realizing that Dale had only two parts (namely the two title roles) in the sprawling Travels With My Aunt. The Potter patter he puts in Just Jim Dale is based on his experiences on his first day in the recording studio.
If you see Just Jim Dale, you’ll likely be pining for the stories behind the stories, for all the amazing encounters and experiences he was unable to shoehorn into his show. That may not seem just. But Jim Dale knows what he’s doing. Isn’t this the greatest Music Hall advice of all?: Always leave your audience wanting more.