MUSIC HALL ACTING.

MUSIC HALL ACTING. We tend to think of good acting as method acting, the conveying of strong internal emotions. Comedy generally requires a different kind of acting, and the Oscars are known for ignoring comic performances. Cary Grant, like Jim Dale, had a great deal of music hall experience, and he probably owed a lot of his superb comic timing to that experience. This blog post on the importance of “deliberate practice” quotes Pauline Kael: “ARCHIE LEACH found his vocation early and stuck to it. He studied dancing, tumbling, stilt-walking, and pantomime, and performed constantly in provincial towns and cities and in the London vaudeville houses. . . .”