"Just Jim Dale'

 
Jim Dale (photo: Joan Marcus)

Any entertainer with a multi-faceted, sixty-year-spanning career (and still counting) in show-business will surely have plenty of memories, anecdotes, and associations up his sleeve and at the ready to help tell his remarkable story. Jim Dale, with the help of director Richard Malby, Jr., has put together a warmly winning one-hundred minute show in which Dale's regales the audience with the highlights of his life upon (and sometimes off)  the stage, with the on-stage accompaniment of pianist Mark York.

What some of us remember and some of us don't is almost irrelevant as the British Music Hall-trained and inspired Dale goes through the paces and postures of a master guide and exemplar of the music hall style, one that has served over the decades to define many of the entertainment greats in vaudeville, film, stage and TV. Chatter, patter and dance are mixed and mingled with jokes as the British- born performer recalls his awkward start upon the music hall stage doing a bit of singing, impersonations and pratfalls for laughs.

Lyric-writing was not out of the reach of the talented, lanky and nimble Dale, who reminds us that he wrote the lyrics to the hit theme song for the film "Georgie Girl," as well as a wonderfully silly ditty "Dicka Dum Dum" for which he encourages the audience into a sing-a-long. Doing the complete final depressing monologue from Noel Coward's "Fumed Oak," however, is probably not as good or as effective an idea to augment his program as is doing the opening scene as the agitated school teacher from the hit play in which he starred  "Joe Egg." More effective and jolly indeed are his clowning and motor-mouthed delivery of famous quotes from Shakespeare, a send-up in part of his similarly tongue-twisting "There's a Sucker Born Every Minute" from "Barnum," the Broadway musical that catapulted him to stardom.

Those of us at a certain age will treasure Dale's appearances on the stage as in "Barnum," and in the 1997 revival of "Candide." Others could very well be more acquainted with Dale as the many voices in the "Harry Potter" audio books , as exemplified in a humorous segment in a recording studio . Even as his personal life, as bookended with "The Colors of My Life" (from "Barnum") is poignantly shared, it remains for his close-out with Irving Berlin's "Let Me Sing and I'm Happy," to make us realize just how many colors of Jim Dale's life have we had the pleasure to share.

What is so astonishing to me is that as soon as we assume that Dale has taken a longer than necessary leave of absence from the stage, he pops up to serve and in some instances save a play as he did as Mr. Peachum in a misguided 2006 revival of  "Threepenny Opera," and in rescuing a languid 2012 revival of Athol Fugard's "Road to Mecca."  What's next Mr. Dale? We are waiting.

"Just Jim Dale" (through August, 10, 2014)  at  the Laura Pels Theatre at Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre 111 W. 46th Street

For tickets ($79) at boxoffice or call  212 - 719 - 1300