The Sunshine Brothers
- Jul 9
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 17
I wish this was the full show, but it’s at least a lot of it – 67 minutes – and it’s well-worth this treasure otherwise being lost. It’s Dick Van Dyke and Jerry Van Dyke starring together in Neil Simon’s play, The Sunshine Boys.
This is from a five-performance the brothers did as a benefit at the Malibu Stage Company in Malibu, California, playing the comedy team of Lewis & Clark whose antipathy for one another during a 43-year career has kept them for speaking to one another in 11 years since they retired. The production took place in April, 2011 when Dick was 85 and Jerry was 79. Jerry directed, and had been bugging Dick for years to do the play and finally wore him done. They subsequently repeated the show for three performances later that year in Texas.
The sound quality isn’t very good, but acceptable enough as long as you turn the volume up. Jerry has the bigger role here as ‘Willie Clark’ (played by Walter Matthau in the movie adaptation), I suspect because, if he had to bug Dick for years to do the show, his brother preferred the smaller part, as ‘Al Lewis’ (that George Burns did in the movie). I think that the casting might have been better if they’d switched. But I’m equally sure they’re doing the roles they wanted to.
There’s one other oddity. For some reason, their production does not include the fictional team’s classic “doctor sketch” which the show builds to. Instead, the Van Dykes do a brief song and some related banter (not in the play), including a joke that’s highly self-referential, though of a sort that’s “oh, what the heck, let’s throw it in” cute. The best I can figure is that this helped keep the show shorter for them. It’s a shame, since the doctor sketch is a very good homage to vaudeville, but it’s nice to see them sing together, and the new material is brief. (In fact, I have the sense that they might have trimmed the play as an accommodation to the age of the stars. When the show premiered on Broadway with Jack Albertson, as 'Willie' and Sam Levene as 'Al'-- who I saw both do it in Los Angeles -- they were 65 and 67 respectively, around 15 years younger than the Van Dykes. Indeed, it's quite possible that this video, maybe, was the bulk of a trimmed-down production. Just a guess.)
This isn’t the definitive production The Sunshine Boys. And for all the things that aren’t great about the video, this is too historically wonderful to have a record of – and to watch.
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