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Jim Dale.
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Since Jim Dale's first award-winning Roundabout appearance in Joe Egg, everything's changed but the actor's talent for moving audiences.
An Interview by Leonard Jacobs
Jim Dale turned 70 in 2005, which means he has spent more than 60 years in show business, beginning in his native England where, still a teen, he made scores of music-hall appearances. He later enjoyed success as a 20-something pop singer, earned an Oscar nomination for his lyrics to Georgy Girl, and was invited by none other than Laurence Olivier to become a leading actor at the National Theatre in London. His co-adaptation, with director Frank Dunlop, of Molière's play Scapin—called Scapino—is what finally introduced Dale to Broadway audiences.
And that was back in 1974. In the years since then, Dale has not only made New York his home, but he has become even more fully an artist of dazzlingly diverse talents. Included on the list are scores of Off-Broadway appearances, five Broadway appearances, four Tony nominations, and one win—in 1980 for Barnum. One of Roundabout's first Broadway transfers—a 1985 revival of Peter Nichols' Joe Egg, pairing him with Stockard Channing—reaffirmed him as a top-tier actor.
Interestingly, given the range of roles he has played—Dr. Pangloss in Candide, Eddie Waters in Comedians, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt, Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl, Fagin in Oliver!, lots of Shakespeare, and let's not forget the more than 100 voices he has created for the six Harry Potter audio books—he has never done a play or a musical by Bertolt Brecht. So The Threepenny Opera is an entirely new experience for him. Dale talked to Front & Center under unusual circumstances. “I'm barricaded in the bedroom with the dog because they're working on my kitchen,” he says on the phone. “I hope you don't mind.”
Front & Center: Good grief, what an interesting way to start talking about Brecht. Is The Threepenny Opera the first work of his that you've performed?
JIM DALE: Yes—I've never even had the opportunity to see The Threepenny Opera before, due to me either working or some other reason. So it was only recently that I listened to a CD in German to give me an idea of what it sounds like. When I read this wonderful translation by Wallace Shawn—I don't know the original—I realized he has really brought it to life. A lot of times you stumble over ways translators have of putting one word after another. His words flow naturally out of your mouth.
I was reflecting on how much of your work as an actor has been in great comic or musical comedy turns, and how Mr. Peachum, courtesy of Mr. Brecht, gives you so much to work with.
He is one of the great theatrical characters. I'm up to my neck in him. I've created a whole history. He's a self-made man, a rag-and-broom man, and he's giving a few old clothes to a few old bums to enable them to look better or to make them look worse. Now he has a business supplying these 'costumes' they wear, the various odd pieces of equipment they need, like a battered wheelchair, or crutches to disguise them into a more appealing sort of cripple. He introduces scars onto people's faces with a palette brush. He gives them certain areas of London to beg—a place where they'll not be ousted, where no other beggar will be in the immediate vicinity of their 'shop front.'
“That's the joy of doing comedy: you're never going to have the audience the same as the night before.”
Is there a difference between Jim Dale singing a typical musical comedy song and Jim Dale singing a specifically Brecht song?
I sell a song, but I'm not a singer. The musicals I've been in have not been in the Andrew Lloyd Webber mode, where one needs wonderful singing voices. You need a voice that sells a song, and I find the actual songs I have to sing I can hit. I'm satisfied with my character's voice. I'm playing him a little, let's say, Bob Hoskins–style.
Let's picture that.
I mean, I shall be playing Peachum with a broad English London accent that you will recognize. It won't be Michael Caine; it won't really be Bob Hoskins—not too broad. The actual character—I've got him up in my head somewhere—has a commanding voice because he's in charge of all those beggars. We've also broken down the fourth wall—we do communicate with the audience. I love that—it was my introduction to legitimate theatre. Olivier saw me playing in Scapino, read in the program that I was a standup comedian, and invited me to the National to do a play that needed someone to communicate with the audience: Peter Nichols' The National Health.
There's a no-fourth-wall quality to a lot of your work—meaning, you're never afraid to make a connection with an audience.
It's a matter of experience. For someone to do that, he has to not see a black hole and start talking to it. When a performer is on stage communicating with an audience, each member has to feel that performer's eyes constantly flicking over each and every one. I like to feel, when you're standing there on your own in the front of the audience, as if you've got 800 fishing lines.
Some people would suggest it's more like being a trapeze artist working without a net.
Yes.
Yet you maintain character, even though, because you're communicating with the audience, anything can theoretically happen.
Well, there's the audience and there's the adrenalin. You are facing 800 people and its pandemonium: What's the next word? In Peachum, every bit of information he thinks the audience should have privately, he'll just sort of lean out and say it. He treats the audience like another member of the family. I remember in Scapino when I turned to talk to the audience, I had to borrow a chocolate from this guy. It was this other guy I was looking at, that I was planning to give it to. They both felt so involved. That's what I think one hopes to achieve by breaking down the fourth wall.
How does Scott Elliott direct something like that?
For one thing, he allows you to have your head and to play—rehearsal being a journey to discovery. A production is 10,000 or 15,000 moments—thousands and thousands of moments are created, one on top of another, until you have enough to create a satisfying evening—which with Peachum, means two things: playing a big operator in the beggar-business, and playing a conniving, heartless hypocrite. We even doubt whether his concern for his daughter's marriage to a crook is not more motivated by fear of being 'done' by his son-in-law than by parental love.
Jime Dale as Mr.Peachum
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Peachum can also be funny—he's obviously a complex character.
That's the joy of doing comedy: you're never going to have the audience the same as the night before. Some audiences tend to get along a different stream of comedy than you had in mind. You'll have four, five, six, seven people laughing at what you never thought was funny before, then the next thing, another 100 people are laughing. You have to imagine them listening. Let the audience appreciate.
Roundabout audiences appreciate you like an old friend.
Joe Egg was my first time at Roundabout, with Stockard Channing. It was such a terrific experience, if hard to sell. People knew from the reviews it was a comedy about a thalidomide child. Little did they realize it was one of the truly great plays.
Audiences are always surprised by how beautifully written it is.
They are—it is. That's why I say you have to imagine them listening. Even when you're a narrator and you're reading a book—and you're just narrating, what you're narrating is just fun. You again have to hear the audience—the one that isn't there.
Thank you. I was looking for an opportunity to ask about narrating the Harry Potter audio books.
Now you have one! When I did the first three books, there was no hurry to get tapes to the shelves—the books were already sold. Now, the book and audiotape have to be on the shelves at the same time. I'm given the manuscript Saturday; I'm in the studio Monday. What I do is read about 100 pages over that weekend and invent the voices for those 100 pages. In the studio, it's 17 pages an hour, 60 the first day. I go home that night and read the next 100 pages and create the next group of voices. There's no time to sit and read the book—I don't even know where the story's going. There are times you regret; you think 'perhaps I could have changed that character.' I was running out of characters once and then the book said, “...into the woodland glade galloped three centaurs.” And I thought, hmmm, I'll give them Welsh accents. One critic—this is funny—said, great performance, but where did Jim Dale get Welsh accents for centaurs?
Maybe Mr. Peachum has a touch of the Welsh centaur.
No, I don't think so. But, you know, it's very much like the Christopher Logue poem:
Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It's too high!
Come to the edge.
And they came,
and we pushed,
And they flew.
Leonard Jacobs is the National Theatre Editor of Back Stage and Backstage.com.
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