Lyceum Theater
New York
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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.
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Israeli double strike on Gaza hospital kills 20Speed Read The dead include five journalists who worked for The Associated Press, Reuters and Al Jazeera
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Trump expands National Guard role in policingSpeed Read The president wants the Guard to take on a larger role in domestic law enforcement
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Trump says he's firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa CookSpeed Read The move is likely part of Trump's push to get the central bank to cut interest rates
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.