Tallulah Bankhead News

On Saturday, February 22, I had the pleasure of seeing LOOPED at the Connecticut Cabaret Theatre in Berlin, CT.  This comedy by Matthew Lombardo is based on a true story that took place back in 1965.  Director Kris McMurray brings out the best in talented actress Kelly Boucher who stars as Tallulah Bankhead, as well as talented actor Chris Pearson, who plays Danny Miller.  The stage chemistry between Kelly Boucher and Chris Pearson is comically brilliant, and further enhanced by James J. Moran, who provides live vocals from the back of the theatre, as Steve the sound engineer!  The deliveries are sensational, from all three cast members, making all three characters completely believable.  The facial expressions, body language, vocal tones and mannerisms displayed by Kelly Boucher and Chris Pearson, including their reactions to each other, are phenomenal, both staying in character the whole time, to the point in which as an audience member, it is easy to forget that you are not watching the real people who are being portrayed.  The sharp contrast between Tallulah's over-the-top personality and Danny Miller's more professional and proper personality is where the majority of the humor arises.  The audience was laughing all throughout the show!

Looped depicts an actual 1965 recording session in which an intoxicated Tallulah Bankhead, portrayed by Connecticut Cabaret Theatre favorite Kelly Boucher, required eight hours to dub a single line from her final movie Die! Die! My Darling! While antagonizing the film editor, Danny Miller, played by Chris Pearson, assigned to the job.

The Village Playwrights present Love Is Queer, staged reading of 10 minute plays to celebrate Valentine's Day, on Monday, February 10 at 7 pm at St. John's, 81 Christopher St., NYC. Suggested donation $10. For reservations email villageplaywrights@gmail.com.

Six-time Tony and Emmy nominee Tovah Feldshuh will return to the Mizner Park Cultural Center on March 28th and 29th for four performances only with her Broadway-bound musical Tovah is LEONA! The show, in which Feldshuh assumes the persona of real estate mogul and hotelier Leona Helmsley, played to sold-out houses in early January. 

Six-time Tony and Emmy nominee Tovah Feldshuh will return to the Mizner Park Cultural Center on Saturday and Sunday, March 28th and 29th for limited engagement with her Broadway-bound musical Tovah is LEONA! The show, in which Feldshuh assumes the persona of real estate mogul and hotelier Leona Helmsley, played to sold-out houses in early January.

Actress/singer Suzy London loves her work with a passion. She is one of those gifted performers who can do a role brilliantly in a play onstage and ... perform equally well in cabaret. In our conversation she tells our readers about how different one arena is from the other. She will do her brand new cabaret show Tattoos on My Heart at Sterling's Upstaris at the Federal on Sunday January 19, 2020. The show is described as an evening of country, bluesy, jazzy tunes. London relates to us with great humor about singing country.

Good Theater ushers in the holiday season with the Maine premiere of WHO'S HOLIDAY! by Matthew Lombardo. The production opens November 9th and plays through November 30th, 2019 at Good Theater's home, the St. Lawrence Arts Center, 76 Congress Street, Portland.  For tickets and information, please call the Box Office at (207) 835-0895 or visit www.goodtheater.com.

Based on real events, a?oeLoopeda?? takes place in the summer of 1965, when Tallulah Bankhead needed to redub - or loop - one line of dialogue for what would be her final movie. What starts out as a friendly visit to the studio quickly dissolves into a hilarious battle of wits and wills between the divine diva and the film's editor.

Dumba?? dumbera?? dumbest? Open Fist Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Neil Simon's Musical Fools, an adaptation of the Simon play Fools, with book and lyrics by Neil Simon and music and lyrics by Phil Swann and Ron West (deLEARious, The People Vs Friar Laurence). West also directs, with music direction by Jan Roper and choreography by Louisa Kendrick Burton. Neil Simon's Musical Fools opens Oct. 12 at Atwater Village Theatre, where performances will continue through Nov. 17; pay-what-you-want previews begin Oct. 4.

Even before she takes the stage, Ann Kittredge is a knock-out. Emerging from the back of the theatre in a red satin robe, hands playfull sparring in black boxing gloves, Ms. Kittredge seems poised for victory. And by the end of her superbly crafted musical revue, Fancy Meeting You Here, An Evening of Ahrens & Flaherty, you'd be hard pressed to find a challenger to disagree. For in this, Ms. Kittredge's follow up to her 2018 Mac Award winning cabaret debut, she emerges as story-songstress supreme: a title that may be undefeated for some time to come.

When I reached for my phone to call Tovah Feldshuh to interview her on her upcoming role as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the west coast premiere of SISTERS IN LAW at The Wallis, I never expected to be so enthralled for the fifty minutes that followed; not only by the irascible, most delightful Tovah Feldshuh herself, but by the razor-witted Justice Ginsburg a?' a two-for-one interview!

In honor of the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, The Human Race Theatre Company's season-long theme is a?oeWomen of Influence: Their Power, Passion, and Pitfalls.a?? In that spirit, they've partnered with The Neon for a companion film series, a?oeWomen of Influence in the Movies.a?? Each of The Human Race's five mainstage productions will be paired with a thematically-related film, shown at The Neon on a Monday evening during the production's run.

Dumb... dumber... dumbest? Open Fist Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Neil Simon's Musical Fools, an adaptation of the Simon play Fools, with book and lyrics by Neil Simon and music and lyrics by Phil Swann and Ron West (deLEARious, The People Vs Friar Laurence). West also directs, with music direction by Jan Roper and choreography by Louisa Kendrick Burton. Neil Simon's Musical Fools opens Oct. 12 at Atwater Village Theatre, where performances will continue through Nov. 17; pay-what-you-want previews begin Oct. 4.

As BroadwayWorld previously reported, stage and screen star, Valerie Harper, passed away following a decade-long battle with cancer. She was 80 years old. Today BroadwayWorld remembers Harper with a look back into our archives.

It was confirmed this evening that stage and screen star, Valerie Harper, passed away today following a decade-long battle with cancer. She was 80 years old.

Robert ('Bob') Ullman (left), the legendary theatre press agent, whose career included Ethel Merman and Mary Martin: Together on Broadway, A Chorus Line (from workshop to Public Theater to Broadway), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in The Visit, Lauren Bacall in Cactus Flower, The Dining Room, Driving Miss Daisy, Sunday in the Park with George, and over 150 additional Broadway and off-Broadway plays and musicals, died on July 31, 2019 in Bayshore, Long Island, New York. He was 97. The cause of death was cardiac arrest. Bob's death was announced by Rev. Joshua Ellis, a long-time Ullman friend, a former Broadway press agent, and now, an Interspiritual minister.

A GoFundMe page has been started for "Mary Tyler Moore" star Valerie Harper, who has been fighting lung cancer that began in 2009 and became brain cancer in 2013, according to ShowBiz411. Harper's husband, Tony Cacciotti, started the page because the cost of home healthcare and prescriptions has exceeded anything insurance and savings can handle.

Main Street Theater (MST) offers the perfect sparkling summer refreshment in the form of the wit and wisdom of Noel Coward's Private Lives. "It is by far my favorite of his plays," shares Coward specialist and the production's director Claire Hart-Palumbo. "In many ways Private Lives is an extraordinary play. The Twentieth Century equivalent of the Well-Made Play, it is elegance personified. The language is intelligent and delightfully witty. It's about the generation that was ravaged by World War I. He chose to write in a more familiar and recognizable style, with humor, wit, vivacity, and charm, but his characters express the same doubts and questioning with an elegance that is inevitably entertaining and astonishingly memorable." Along with Hart-Palumbo's insights, MST Executive Artistic Director Rebecca Greene Udden, who has a delicious cameo role in the show, offers, "It's just so brilliantly funny. I think we could all use a good laugh right now."

The Skin of Our Teeth, the Pulitzer Prize-winning tribute to the indestructibility of the human race by Thornton Wilder, opens on the beautiful outdoor stage at Will Geer's Theatricum Botanicum on Saturday,July 13, where performances continue through Sept. 29. 

LAGUNA PLAYHOUSE is delighted to present French Stewart and Vanessa Claire Stewart starring in the wonderfully comic HARVEY, written by Mary Chase and directed by Andrew Barnicle. Comments Artistic Director Ann E. Wareham and Executive Director Ellen Richard, "We could not think of a better play to end our 98th season with than HARVEY, starring French and Vanessa Claire Stewart under the inspired direction of Andrew Barnicle. French Stewart will be the perfect Elwood, a role he has always wanted to play!