‘GOLDEN GIRLS – THE LAUGHS CONTINUE’ COMES TO PLAYHOUSE SQUARE

The Golden Girls, a popular television show that aired from 1985 to 1992, follows the lives of four older women (Rose, Dorothy, Blanche & Sophia), who share a home in Miami, Florida. They get into all kinds of shenanigans and comical situations that provided laughs to television audiences for seven years.

Now, the story continues, as if it never closed on these women, but it is set in present-time, complete with updated technology.

CleveRock checked in with Vince Kelley (“Blanche”) to give the details about the production!

CleveRock: Without giving too many spoilers, can you briefly discuss the story that this particular show follows?

Vince: “Golden Girls, The Laughs Continue is as if the Golden Girls never went off the air. It’s 2024, and they’re still just kicking it. They’re still having a good time; they’re still wearing the same clothes. They’re still living in the same house, but it’s completely different. We’re still on TV, except we switched from cable to a streaming site so that we can say some stuff that you can’t hear on your everyday seven o’clock, right? The basic outline is you got Sophia; she is out on bail from selling some medicine, shall we say, to her fellow compatriots at Shady Pines. And she was arrested, and she’s got an ankle monitor on, and she’s on house arrest. Rose and Blanche have developed a hookup app, a dating app, shall we say, for seniors called Creak-N, which is having major success. And Dorothy, Blanche and Rose convinced her to join the dating app, and she meets a younger man on it who’s looking for an older woman. And that younger man just happens to be the prosecuting attorney for Sophia’s case. It’s a recipe for success and laughter!”

CleveRock: Is the story still easy to follow and enjoy for younger folks who were not yet born when Golden Girls was a hit television show, as well as for those who never saw it?

Vince: “Our show is chock-full of Easter Eggs and the iconic sayings and everything for a Golden Girls superfan. We’ve got references in there that maybe they mentioned one time on one episode in the fourth season, the third episode, and only diehard fans are going to know that. But it’s just a fun, broad story about four older ladies living in a house together. That’s still pretty universal. I mean, we do a big meet and greet after every show that you can purchase a little additional ticket for. My favorite thing is when a husband will come up, and he’ll be like, ‘My wife dragged me here tonight, but my abs hurt from laughing so hard. I had no idea about a single episode of the show, and I’m dying.’ And I think that’s what bringing the show into 2024 really helps with because even if you don’t know what happened with the Golden Girls in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we left that we’re doing something totally new now. So there’s plenty for an avid fan and somebody who has no idea what we’re doing.”

CleveRock: When Golden Girls was on television, internet connections didn’t exist, and dating apps, like the one in the show, were purely science fiction. How are the characters adjusting to present-day technology?

Vince: “Oh, I think it’s great. I mean, some more than others. It’s so funny, like, I mean, I don’t want to spoil anything too much, but we find out that Rose is actually the complete developer for the app. So you wouldn’t imagine Rose, but you find out that she went back to school. She went to St. Olaf Community College online and got her degree in computer sciences. So, this would be just hilarious and funny for Rose, of all people, to do that. She’s always smarter than she lets on. So I think it’s fun. I mean, that’s part of the humor right there. You have these four older women, and they’re online, or they’re on stage, and we say that something’s busing, or we use some vernacular of today tha the juxtaposition is a laugh in itself.”

CleveRock: The show will play in Cleveland for several weeks. What is special about the show that allows you to pack venues, especially in a historic theater district like Playhouse Square, for several weeks? How much of your audience that once in the latter weeks are excited about the show from word of mouth of patrons that saw the show earlier in its run?

Vince: The Golden Girls television show can be tied to amazing writing, fun, topical references, and also just the amazing chemistry of the four women who played those parts. They were all Emmy winners in their respective shows, and not a ton of shows have ever done that on television. So they just worked together so well.

We have tried to make that the absolute centerpiece of our show as well. So we have these four actors, myself included, and we love, and we respect each other so much, and we have so much fun. We’ve been doing this for almost two years now, and we still have so much fun.

I think the word of mouth that you specifically spoke of is something that makes me most proud of the show. Our producers have given us such amazing controlled freedom. There is a script, obviously, and we follow it, but the script is really more of a guideline for us.

You’re never getting the same show twice. We took the spirit of you can go online and watch Golden Girls bloopers where they tried to crack each other up all the time, but obviously never made it out of the show. That’s not the format of television. Well, we have the ability to have bloopers and to try to crack each other up and do a little ad-lib and change a little line every single night just to keep us fresh, keep us on our toes. If something happens in the world that day, we’re probably going to put it in the show somehow that night. And then the audience is like, ‘This show was created just for me tonight. ‘And that’s so cool. And that’s what we pride ourselves so much on. We’re able to deliver a new, fun, exciting, topical, different show every single night. We have reviews that come in on Ticketmaster, and so often, they talk about how we keep it really city-specific. So we’ve already started our research on Cleveland. How are we going to relate to these people and what’s happening in their city that we can talk about that they’re going to think is fun? We’ll not only poke fun but celebrate and, of course, just find relatability with the people in the audience.

CleveRock: Why should theatergoers in Cleveland come out and see Golden Girls – The Laughs Continue

Vince: Theater-goers should come and see Golden Girls – The Laughs Continue because, as the title clearly states, the laughs continue. We like to say that we average 14 laughs a minute, which is a lot if you really think about it. And that’s what we want. We want your face to hurt. We want your abs to hurt. We want you to come in; the lights will go down; nothing else in the world matters. I don’t want to go there, but this is a stressful time in the country as it is every four years. And when you’re in our TV episode that we put on for 90 minutes, there is nothing but joy, laughter, fun, raunchy, ridiculous entertainment. And that’s obviously cliche. We want you to escape and blah, blah blah. But it is our number one goal. We sit in the back before every single show, the five of us sit on the couch and we have our little routines and our rhythm and the things we do before every show. And the center point of that we want to make sure that everybody has a good time tonight. We don’t want anybody to feel left out.