They’re together again: George and Gracie! And Bruce and Semina!
Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury has fashioned a stage production “George and Gracie: The Early Years” out of classic routines found in episodes of a TV sitcom that first aired six decades ago.
The show — a benefit for Seven Angels’ HALO Awards ceremony, which honors high school theater around the state — is also an opportunity to see Seven Angels’ Artistic Director Semina De Laurentis perform onstage, reunited with her old friend and long-ago Southern Connecticut State University classmate R. Bruce Connelly.
De Laurentis founded Seven Angels in 1990 while she was still working regularly as a professional actress, best known for originating the role of Sister Mary Amnesia in the original off-Broadway production of “Nunsense” in 1985.
De Laurentis occasionally still acts at Seven Angels — she returned to her Amnesia habit to celebrate her theater’s 25th anniversary in 2015, and went on for one weekend as Aunt Jean in the coming-of-age melodrama “A Room of My Own” last year when another actress had a scheduling conflict. But she’s more often seen giving perky pre-show announcements on opening nights and hosting special events.
Connelly, who grew up in Wallingford, estimates he’s been in over two dozen shows at Seven Angels over the years. “George and Gracie” also marks his 18th collaboration with director Julia Kiley. A familiar face in Connecticut theater, Connelly has a separate career in TV for which he’s seldom recognized: He’s worn the furry costume of Barkley the dog on “Sesame Street” since the early 1990s.
When George Burns and his wife Gracie Allen began airing their TV series in 1950, cleverly called “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show,” they’d been performing together for nearly 30 years. In his 1989 memoir “All My Best Friends,” Burns explains, “So, some of us were happily married, some of us were happily single, and some of us didn’t know the difference. Then one day they invented television and we all went into it.”
The couple met as vaudeville performers in the early 1920s, developing a comedy act and marrying in 1926. They moved into the then-new medium of talking pictures in the 1930s, while also starring in a hit radio series that ran for 14 years before television beckoned. “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” ran for eight seasons, much of that time alongside “I Love Lucy” Monday nights on CBS.
When Gracie Allen retired from show business in 1958, the series was renamed “The George Burns Show” and ran for one more season. Allen died in 1964 at the age of 69. Burns enjoyed an extraordinary comeback after he was cast in the film version of Neil Simon’s play “The Sunshine Boys.” Its success led Burns to star in 10 more films, another TV series, comedy specials and concert acts. George Burns died in 1996 at the age of 100.
In another of his many memoirs, “The Third Time Around,” Burns says that when he met with CBS executives about adapting the act for a TV series, “I said, ‘Gentlemen, supposing Gracie and I do the same thing we were doing in radio, with one slight change. Gracie and I are still married, we have our nextdoor neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Morton, and the same kind of situations. However, I can step out of the set and talk directly into the camera. This way I can further the plot, or complicate it, and make any kind of comment I want.'”
That breaking of the fourth wall became a distinction of the Burns and Allen show, and is used in the Seven Angels recreation. “George does an opening monologue,” Connelly relates, “then he steps into the house, through the wall. He’s the only one who gets to do that.”
There’s a whole different theater piece based on George Burns’s life and work —”Say Goodnight, Gracie” by Rupert Holmes, of “Escape (The Pina Colada Song)” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” fame. Connelly performed that one-man show at Seven Angels in 2013 and at the Ivoryton Playhouse in 2014, though at first he questioned his suitability for the role. “I thought, ‘My voice is nothing like his. I don’t smoke. I try to keep my voice clear.’ So I just watched the show — they have reruns every day on Antenna TV — and finally I heard something in his voice that I could do, and built it from there.”
His diligence obviously paid off, since Connelly will portray George Burns in yet another project later this year: a New York reading of a new musical based on the life of Bobby Darin.
For her part, De Laurentis says the secret to being Gracie Allen is “her timing. How she looks at things. She brings in a new thought, a different angle, that takes everyone off guard.”
“George and Gracie: The Early Years,” De Laurentis explains, consists of “three comedy routines in the first act and two in the second,” drawn from the TV series but based on bits that had been in the couple’s act for years before that. “We went back to the old, old radio shows and just pulled stuff, including vaudeville stuff. They recycled a lot, so you’d find some old bits and then find them again later. We put them together so they weave into one another.”
Besides Connelly as Burns and De Laurentis as Allen, there’s a supporting cast handling an assortment of straight-man and wacky-neighbor roles. The morose “Happy Postman” character (originally played by funny-voice legend Mel Blanc) makes an appearance, as does the show’s announcer and commercial-break pitchman Harry von Zell — played here by WATR radio host Tom Chute.
Both De Laurentis and Connelly note that “George and Gracie: The Early Years” isn’t simply a nostalgia affair. They delight in seeing the younger members of the cast, who are experiencing the routines for the first time, cracking up at rehearsals.
“We’re just doing the bits,” De Laurentis says. “Burns and Allen just wanted people to laugh … and that’s what we’re doing.”
“GEORGE AND GRACIE: THE EARLY YEARS” runs Feb. 9-March 5 at Seven Angels Theatre, Hamilton Park Pavilion, 1 Plank Road, Waterbury. Tickets are $39.50-$41. 203-757-4676, sevenangelstheatre.org.
