This runs around ten minutes in two parts, and one should play after the other in the player I have expertly configured and embedded below for your dancing pleasure.
In 1995, Jerry Lewis stepped into the role of the Devil in a Broadway revival of Damn Yankees. My pal Paul Dini and I were there for his opening night and it was great fun. They warped the show a bit to let Jerry be Jerry, and ordinarily, we theater purists frown on such tampering. But in this one, it worked…or at least it did in the Marquis Theater in New York. Later, Jerry went on tour with it and from all reports, it began to seem less like the show that Adler and Ross wrote and more like one of Jer's earlier telethons. He broke character. He interpolated old bits from his night club act. He just carried on something awful…and most who went to see him loved it.
This clip is from the tour. It's the number, "Those Were the Good Old Days," which is his character's big solo in the second act. When Paul and I saw it, they'd added in the bit with the canes, which is a routine Jerry was doing on stages back in his Dino days, but he didn't stop and tell jokes and the whole thing was about half this length. The more he was in the show, the longer it got to the point where he dropped all pretense of playing Satan and just played Caesars Palace, if you know what I mean. Since I didn't see the show on tour, I have no idea if it threw things wildly out of balance or if audiences were able to leap out of the show, watch Jerry be Jerry for a while, then leap back into the show.
I know some people were outraged but in his defense, a few things should be said. One is that this was Damn Yankees, hardly the most sacred of texts. Secondly, the character of Applegate isn't in Damn Yankees all that much so if you put a legend in that part and you sell tickets on the strength of his stardom, some buyers of those tix are likely to feel cheated if he only does what's written. Thirdly, he's Jerry Lewis. Many of the ordinary rules do not apply.
Beyond that, you can judge for yourself. Personally, I think he overdoes it a little but if I'd gone to see this, I probably still would have had a great time. Then again, I'm not the author of Damn Yankees. If I were and I cared about more than the grosses, I might have gone after him and the director with a large pair of hedge trimmers.
