Minstrels Compare Well With TV Show

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32114, 9 October 1969, Page 18

Minstrels Compare Well With TV Show

The answer to the sixtyfour dollar question is yes. The “Black and White Minstrel Show” is just as good at the Theatre Royal as it is on television. Indeed, it is a great deal better. The pace is just as fast and the live performance—when it is as live as this one—makes television look like an animated corpse.

It is a rare show that is applauded three times during the first item but this tribute was paid last evening. The stage sets and costumes were quite outstanding, and the audience gave the praise that was due.

The evening faltered for a few minutes when Denny Willis—billed as the “man who made the Queen laugh” —had difficulty winning the same success in Christchurch. Then it was back to singing and dancing, and a purist would have noted that the amplification scored less than 100 per cent for quality, and the dancing a good deal less for verve and crispness. But after the third item the show never looked back. Ken Wood is an excellent ventriloquist with a wide range of tones, a reasonably original act, and a script in place of the usual patter. Warren, Daveen and Sparks—three Royal command performers—have a

comic acrobatic act as funny, and as skilled, as one could hope to see. Denny Willis showed that his real talent lay in clowning, and had the house in hysterics in acts with Joan Laurie, Johnnie Mack, and at the head of the Hunt Club Quartette. The dancers presented Spanish dancing that may not have been Spanish but was certainly dancing, and the Mitchell Minstrels did credit to George Mitchell with their performace of "Michael Row the Boat Ashore.” But the star of the evening was undoubtedly Joan Laurie, a hilarious comic who had her audience with her from almost the first minute. With a warm, cheeky humour that was sometimes vulgar but never distasteful, she put a bridge across the footlights that sealed the success of the show. —M.P.C.