Mr. Entertainer

THE YEARS HAVE NOT BEEN KIND TO EVERY ELEment of these shows. His jokes about race relations are a beat or two behind the times. Some bits, like the fast-draw gunplay — which is ultimately not so different than watching a man fly model airplanes — or his lip-synching to Robert Preston's recording of "Trouble," are just puzzling now. More troubling is his famously ostentatious humility; in his eagerness to please, he can become his own worst enemy — he mugs, plays cute, puts on a widdle kiddie voice, laughs too hard or too long. One feels for him.

But when he's working, when he's really inside a song or a dance, none of that matters. The BBC's 1963 Meet Sammy Davis Jr. (part of the museum's "London and More" program) is the thing to see here. Performing in a tan sport coat that suits him somehow better than the tux in which he's elsewhere clad, he is all business and in terrific form. At ease across the octaves, a master of melodic leaps and plunges, of long-arc portamento and the slyly bent note, Davis had a voice variously redolent of trombone, French horn, tenor and even baritone saxophone. He was a juicier singer than Sinatra — if not quite as profound — and a bluesier one, and a jazzier one, but could marshal as well the semi-operatic throb and sob of a Mario Lanza. If there is in his singing, as in the rest of his act, a bit of the showoff, of Check out what I can do, well, you know, he could. He phrased like the dancer he was, syncopating, punctuating, messing with the pulse. Singing or dancing he seems to be making it up on the spot, every note, every change from heel to toe a new possibility. Everything about him said soar: Not only his songs, but the career they define, and the life the career defined, are manifestoes of self-actualization — "Yes I Can," "Gonna Build a Mountain," "Once in a Lifetime," "A Lot of Livin' To Do," "I've Gotta Be Me."

"I'm gonna do great things," he sings, and does.

SAMMY IN THE SIXTIES | "Golden Boy of Broadway" (through Thursday, February 27) and "London and More" (Friday, February 28, through Sunday, April 6) | At the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Dr., Beverly Hills | (310) 786-1025