“It’s Going to Be ‘Utter Kaye-os’”

Garden City Telegram – Apr. 25, 1975

“I like to influence their minds when they’re young,” is the way Danny Kaye puts it, explaining why this remarkable artist will, on Sunday, April 27 (4-5 p.m., CDT) conduct “Danny Kaye’s Look-In at the Metropolitan Opera,” to be seen on “The CBS Festival of Lively Arts for Young People” series on the CBS Television Network.

“Utter Kaye-os” is the way one wit describes Kaye’s “Look-In” presentations. (He’s been doing them at the Met since 1972, but this is the first time one is being presented to a nationwide audience.) As usual, the Met will get up in its richest panoply and spread out on the stage like a row of royal coronations. And, also as usual, it will keep a date with hilarity.

For an hour, it will lend itself to Danny Kaye, contortionist, mime and sleight-of-tongue artist.

With the whole Met as his foil, and his own bottomless bag of comedic turns, Kaye will preside over what Metropolitan mezzo-soprano Regina Resnick once called “an operatic laugh-in.”

But it’s not all for laughs. There are lessons to be learned. Kaye serves as an introduction to the many elements that go into a Metropolitan production—sets, stage machinery, lights, costumes and props, etc.

Under Kaye’s tutorage, however, the lesson is far from ho-hum. “If they want an academic man,” he says, “I don’t think I’m their man.”

Indeed, moving like a professor of musical history gone berserk, Kaye teaches lessons to appall a purist.

Yet that’s typical Kaye. He’s been performing that way since he played a watermelon seed in a school play at P.S. 149 in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was five-and-a-half years old. At 17, he was doing the borsch summer-resort circuit in the Catskills. There, besides being an entertainer, he was known as a “tumler,” an aide of the hotel manager sent out to “make with the tumult” and, by distracting guests, prevent them from checking out.

In 1940, Kaye married Sylvia Fine, and one month later was a howling success. Miss Fine (as she’s known professionally) writes virtually all of Kaye’s musical material. One of her early songs for him was “Stanislavsky,” a spoof on Russian “method” acting. Playwright Moss Hart heard Kaye do the number in an obscure New York club. That got the comedian a role in the Broadway musical “Lady in the Dark” in which he proved a smash. After another stage musical, “Let’s Face It,” Hollywood seemed inevitable, and Kaye signed a five-year contract with producer Samuel Goldwyn.

Through the years, one of Kaye’s abiding loves has been children. He’s been widely praised for his work for UNICEF, for example.

“Danny has a unique affinity with children,” says Miss Fine. “Recently, a five-month-old child was visiting our apartment. Eventually he became restless and cranky. I put him next to Danny, who was taking a nap in the bedroom. In about 15 minutes the baby stopped crying. We walked to the bedroom and there, face-to-face, was Danny and the child. They were having a conversation!”

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