Word: scapino
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Dale has accomplished his goal, but he is emphatically not a little bloke onstage. Currently starring in Scapino (TIME, June 3), he is the spring season's biggest sensation - over, under, beside, beneath, across, atop and flat on his back upon the Broadway stage. Tall and lanky, he seems endowed with a flamingo's limbs - concave knees; one-legged, plumb-line balance; flapping, winglike arms. Playing the duplicitous Neapolitan servant Scapino involves at least as much acrobatics as acting. At one point he keels over from the edge of a 10-ft. platform, grabs onto a hanging rope...
...there he perfected his tumbledown, knockabout maneuvers. "Falling is an art," he says. "It's a matter of relaxing and of knowing which part of the body will take the fall best. Otherwise you smash yourself badly." In fact, he has. In a London repertory performance of Scapino last year, he missed his Tarzan-like lunge for the rope and broke his heel. For the next few performances he played the show in a leg cast and a wheelchair. "Just like a joust," he recalls fondly...
...father of four. "My wife Tricia, she's the oldest. The children are Belinda, 16, Murray, 14, Adam, 12, and Toby, who will be 10 this year if we let him." Because of his family, Dale is undecided about the onslaught of American offers since his Scapino triumph. "I am very selfish about family," he says. "I have only another few years until the children leave." Then, too, Director Dunlop is talking about a possible Jim Dale Henry...
French farce is customarily associated with the bedroom. There are no bedrooms in Scapino, but the evening is filled with sheer comic bedlam anyway. The Young Vic presented this Molière farce earlier in the season at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It has returned in a hands-across-the-sea gesture to aid the financially beleaguered Circle in the Square Joseph E. Levine Theater. Scapino should prove to be just the right box office tonic...
...title role, Jim Dale is the traditional wily scamp of a servant. He is sassy, resourceful and clever, the sort of endearing rogue who puts his fat, pompous and moneyed betters in their places. At the behest of two lovelorn sons with two miserly fathers, Scapino engineers an endless repertory of deceptions with a blazing battery of slapstick. Whether mimicking the two dunderheaded old fossils, or mulcting them, or pretend-hiding them in sacks and flailing the daylights out of them with a cloth truncheon shaped like an oversize bologna, there is no stopping Scapino. Eventually caught...