Corbett a big hit

Press, 15 March 1980, Page 6

Corbett a big hit

By

HOWARD MCNAUGHTON

“The Ronnie Corbett Show,” Michael Edgley Presentations, Town Hall Main Auditorium, March 14 and 15. Running time: 8.15 p.m. to 10.35 p.m. A ventriloquist expects to be upstaged by his dummy; but the start of a show does not expect to be outmanoeuvred by his ventriloquist’s fourth stand-by dummy. Yet when Barry Krause got properly into his stride with his four-handed routine, all his dummies contributing to a virtuoso “Old Macdonald Had a Farm,” he reached a peak of dramatic and comic achievement that was not bettered by anything else in the evening. He managed it without even bringing out his fifth puppet: the snoring koala pictured in the programme is presumably reserved for injury time. Ronnie Corbett, to be fair, certainly satisfied his audi-

ence, who wanted to see the man in the flesh and convince themselves, through their opera glasses, that the television cameras had not deceived them. From his first appearance, clad in a maxikilt and inivting comparison wjth Clint Eastwood, he drew a steady stream of laughter; some Muldoon jokes, a namedropping song with local references, and the obligatory Air New Zealand routine convinced everyone that he was doing it specially for them, and he was certainly an

k - '■ ■ n® I above-average success. His**V tricks of inflection and man-W nerisms Of delivery are very" polished, and had the audi- , ence hooting even at hackneyed Lilliputian jokes. i Mr Corbett’s problem, how. 'ever, is that audiences know him through meticulously ed- . ited screen appearances 4 which present him much more sympathetically than >:■ can happen in a 50-minute ; j' stage act; he only had to ¥ seem to repeat himself once, : or to fall back on a routine vf touring gag. for the live vitality of his show to be lost. Mr Krause, on the other < hand, has all the advantages j: that oblivion can offer, . everything he did was a surprise, whereas nothing that Mr Corbett did really was. And when all four dummies I were lurching out of their - containers, uttering four dis- < tinct varieties of broad Australian pidgin English, they ef- * ; fectively showed that there i is only one thing a variety - show needs — variety.