Theater: Looped

Lyceum Theater

New York

(212) 239-6200

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More than four decades after her death, Tallulah Bankhead is back on Broadway, said John Simon in Bloomberg.com. “Valerie Harper does a bravura turn” as Bankhead, the witty actress and bon vivant who catted her way across the stage and screen from the 1920s through the 1960s. The premise of Matthew Lombardo’s play is that Bankhead has been called in to overdub a botched line for Die! Die! My Darling, a late-career flop made when the actress was 63. What should be a quick take in the studio turns into an all-day affair, as the actress holds court with a disgruntled film editor and a sound engineer, dispensing one-liners and bits of Scotch-soaked wisdom in her “Southern tigress drawl.”

“Like Tallulah at her most soused, the play’s wit level lurches up and down,” said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. “I have a drinking problem,” Harper’s Bankhead growls early on. “Whenever I’m not drinking, oh honey, it’s a problem.” Dishing on Joan Crawford, whom she claims to have slept with (Bankhead was open about her bisexuality), she cracks that the famously abusive actress “kept getting out of bed to beat the children.” Though many punch lines can be predicted well before they land, when delivered in Harper’s put-on gravelly drawl, they’re “slashingly funny.”

Looped is at its best when “going for laughs,” said Elysa Gardner in USA Today. Harper, the experienced comic actress who played Mary Tyler Moore’s TV sidekick Rhoda Morgenstern in the 1970s, is as good as she’s ever been in this “witty, exuberant performance.” At times, she suggests that Bankhead’s “cartoonish flamboyance” was in part a survival mechanism for the actress, allowing her to play a part rather than be a genuine person. Bankhead’s “cunning, resilience, and genius for irony” have seldom been captured so eloquently by an actress, and together Harper and Lombardo do their inimitable subject justice.