Carol Burnett is coming to the Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City — and the audience will be part of the show.
The legendary television star will perform her one-woman show “Carol Burnett: An Evening of Laughter and Reflection” on June 2. (Tickets go on sale on Friday at 10 a.m at arttix.artsaltlake.org.) She’ll be the only one onstage, but it’s not exactly a solo act.
As she so often did to open her 1967-78 CBS variety show, Burnett will have the stagehands bring up the house lights and she’ll take questions from the audience. And she’ll introduce montages of clips from her TV show, featuring her regular cast — Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman, Lyle Waggoner and Tim Conway — as well as her guest stars.
Mostly she'll reminisce and tell funny stories. And she has a lot of funny stories about her life and the show that millions still remember so fondly — because, she believes, she and her castmates were “having fun.”
FILE - In this March 19, 1978 file photo, Carol Burnett, right, laughs with Tim Conway during taping of her final show, in Los Angeles. Conway, the stellar second banana to Burnett who won four Emmy Awards on her TV variety show, died Tuesday, May 14, 2019, according to his publicist. He was 85. (AP Photo/ George Brich, File)
“If we could impart that to our audience and have fun with each other, that’s going to make our show successful,” Burnett, who will turn 87 on April 26, told TV critics several years ago. “And no divas. We had the quietest show in town. Nobody had temper tantrums or hissy fits that I ever saw. And I think that’s one of the reasons we had such a good time.”
Half a century later, the sketches in that series still hold up.
“I guarantee you the dentist sketch with Tim and Harvey will make people fall down laughing and holding their sides a hundred years from now,” Burnett said. “It will never not be hysterically funny.”
