KAYE BALLARD: "THE SHOW GOES ON" - A new documentary by Dan Wingate - New York City Article

KAYE BALLARD: “THE SHOW GOES ON”
A new documentary by Dan Wingate

More information - and streaming links - here.

This is one of several highly-recommended new documentaries that, in another moment in history, would have been released to theaters and film festivals, but which have, in this age, skipped the theatrical stage and gone straight to online streaming. (Another excellent film to meet that fate is Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things, which I am personally proud to have had a hand in.)
Kaye Ballard (1925-2019) “was not only a great comic, but she could also sing up a storm,” that sentiment is succinently uttered here by Carol Burnett, but expressed repeatedly, in one form or another, by nearly all of the film’s many high-profile talking heads, all close friends, co-workers, and fans of the singer-comic-actress. It’s a point that’s worth making more than once. Indeed, there are only a handful of entertainers scattered across showbiz history who are just as melodious as they are funny. Among male performers, it’s pretty much just Jimmy Durante, and while there are a few more great ladies who could be so described, such as Martha Raye and Rose-Marie, that doesn’t make Kaye Ballard any less remarkable. Even in this rarefied company, there was no one like Ballard, who could break your heart with a traditional Neapolitan song one minute and then have you rolling around on the floor, laughing uncontrollably, the next.
Director Dan Wingate commendably avoided one obvious cinematic sandtrap: nearly every documentary of this sort has the “talking heads” telling us over and over that such-and-such an artist “should have been much more famous and successful than they actually were.” This would have been a fairly meaningless statement to utter about Kaye Ballard. It’s hard to imagine that artist, who was born Catherine Gloria Balotta in 1925, could have possibly been any more busy than she was: for roughly 70 years she did one movie and Broadway show after another, filling the brief moments between these high-stakes featured roles with appearances on virtually every TV variety show, sitcom, and even game show that ever there was; when Perry Como, Jack Paar, and the Muppets all gave her a night off, she’d be doing her one woman show in supper clubs and nite spots across the country and the world. There were no gaps in her calendar, and, Ms. Ballard expresses no bitternesses, telling us that the most recent years of her life have been the most rewarding.
Like the recent film on Ms. Ballard’s contemporary, Rose Marie, Wait for Your Laugh (also recommended), the film-makers had the subject herself to speak her mind in an extended interview; but unlike the 2017 documentary on Rose-Marie (both ladies toured in the traveling review 4 Girls 4 at different times), Ballard obviously preferred to avoid her personal life, other than than her relationship with her mother. Perhaps the best attribute of this new documentary is that, in nearly every one of her films and TV appearances, Ballard was, as Rex Reed refers to her, “a second banana,” and was never on screen as often as we’d like. (It’s worth noting that Ballard’s legacy has also been preserved in a different and highly commendable way by NY cabaret artist Gretchen Reinhagen.) Mr. Wingate’s film, however, gives us relentless, wall-to-wall Kaye for over 90 minutes, one classic bit and one wonderful song after another - it still seems impossible to get enough of a talent like hers.