It’s always a pleasure to see a pro at work.
I don’t care what the play is — if Brian Dennehy or Frank Langella or Eileen Atkins is in it, I’m heading to the theater.
This past week I enjoyed a double bill of two old pros — Jim Dale and Marlo Thomas, both justly admired for their comedic skills, but also actors who can land an emotional punch.
Dale, a sprightly 78, finishes his run Sunday at off-Broadway’s Laura Pels Theatre in his one-man show, “Just Jim Dale.”
Skillfully directed by Richard Maltby Jr., it’s a celebration of the British music hall, where a teenage Dale got his start, singing, dancing and telling jokes dating back to Queen Victoria. That mixture of popular song, comedy and variety acts died out around 1960 — John Osborne’s movie “The Entertainer,” starring Laurence Olivier, captured its seedy, final days. Dale may be the only performer left who can do the old routines, which he does with aplomb.
The jokes, usually puns and plays on words mixed with a dash of smut, are hilarious. So, too, are the songs and comic dances, which Dale, who studied ballet, makes awkward and graceful at the same time. Of all the pleasures of the city this summer, at the top of my list is Dale performing “The Lambeth Walk” from “Me and My Girl.”
Thrown into this grab bag is a pungent monologue from a short Noël Coward play called “Fumed Oak.” Dale plays a henpecked husband and father who decides to chuck his family and, for the first time in his life, live for himself. It’s risky to drop a serious monologue into an evening of light comedy, but the writing and the delivery make it the highlight of the show.
Soon after I saw “Just Jim Dale,” I headed to East Hampton to see Marlo Thomas in a fine new play by Joe DiPietro called “Clever Little Lies” at Guild Hall. If you’re of a certain age, as I am, you grew up laughing at Thomas, now 76, in “That Girl” and listening (over and over again) to her on the record “Free to Be . . . You and Me.”
So it’s no surprise that, playing a nosy and slightly overbearing mother, she lands all the laughs. But DiPietro’s play takes some surprising twists. What begins as Neil Simon shifts to Noël Coward and ends up being positively Edward Albee. The final scene, in which Thomas’ husband (an excellent Greg Mullavey) sits alone in the dark in his now-uneasy chair, is right out of “A Delicate Balance” (which is being revived this fall on Broadway).
Thomas handles the shifts in tone deftly. And there was dead silence in the house when, at the end of the play, she climbed the stairs to bed, hunched over, tentative, frightened.
“Clever Little Lies” played its final performance last weekend, but several producers are vying to bring it to New York later this year, with Thomas right where she belongs: center stage.