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Gangway, Daahlings! Tallulah's back in town, arriving three sheets to the wind March 14 in rickety high heels at the Lyceum, Broadway's oldest theatre and only a few months younger than what La Bankhead would have been (108, if you please). She arrived in Looped, in all senses of that word, in the form of TV's former Rhoda Morgenstern, Valerie Harper, dropping the F-bomb the second she hit the stage as if to eradicate any image you might have of her. The only constant is the kind of classic comic timing you can set a Swiss watch by. Not for nothing was her mother on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Rhoda" played by Nancy Walker.

This timing gets a rat-a-tat-tat workout in the vehicle Matthew Lombardo has scripted and Rob Ruggiero has directed. It catches Tallulah on what would be her last day of film work, at a Los Angeles recording studio trying to approximate an impossibly contorted line of expositional dialogue for a 1965 penny-dreadful British horror flick titled, Tallulah-like, "Die! Die! My Darling!"

Naturally, she reported to work thoroughly sloshed and tardy, much to the teeth-grinding consternation of the sound engineer on duty (Michael Mulheren) and the poor flunky assigned to squeeze that single line of dialogue out of her (Brian Hutchison). After many failed felled swoops at the assignment, she stalked off the soundstage, returning after intermission contrite and coked-up ("There was the longest line in the ladies' room," she explained, dusting her nose a bit). And the beat goes on, one long Ta-loop-de-loop till relative recording success is met.

Much of the post-show chit-chat centered on how precise and persuasive the impersonation was, and how much humanity Harper was able to slip in between wisecracks. Of course, a case could be made that the Bankhead persona fit her like — well, like the silk charmeuse she traipses around in, loose-legged and seductive, causing you to seriously wonder whether she is fettered by any undergarments.

William Ivey Long, who designed the inviting frock, kept its mystery. "That's the magic of the theatre," he twinkled mischievously. "It's a very mobile thin satin. I thought I knew something about it, being from the South, and, when I started researching it, I realized that I didn't so I've learned even more doing that dress."

It wears well with legend-becoming mink, too. Bette Davis worked the fur a lot in "All About Eve" to suggest Tallulah. "That's very much the Margo Channing neckline," Long pointed out. "They all wore it in that period. This is a real mink, from a vintage collection. That's the real cut. Those animals died about 50 years ago."

Harper made her star entrance at Sardi's fashionably last-to-arrive, peppy as all get-out (once a Michael Kidd dancer, always a Michael Kidd dancer). She dove right into the interviews, betraying nary a hint of the hard work she had just put in on stage.

She knew exactly what she wanted audiences to take away from her show. "Hurting ribs," she said, "from splitting their sides laughing. It's always like that, too. Even quiet matinee days where the ladies are not so fond of the F-bomb, they get with it and go, 'Oh, yes, that's the way Tallulah used to talk,' and they kinda come along.

"It was a great script that was sent to us. Tony Cacciotti, my darling husband, said, 'I can produce this, and I'd like to take it to Broadway.' This is our fourth venue: Pasadena, South Florida, Washington, DC's Arena Stage and now here.

"The show has grown at every stop. There have been rewrites all the way along but, more than anything, there was finessing the directing. Rob Ruggiero has worked very hard on all the characters. I had two new actors for Broadway. This was three weeks of rehearsals, then three weeks of previews — very helpful to be really ready." Continued...