The Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts presents the Los Angeles premiere of Renée Taylor’s MY LIFE ON A DIET, the award-winning, autobiographical comedy written by Taylor and Joseph Bologna, which opens its 12 performance, limited engagement on Friday, April 5 and continues through Sunday, April 14, 2019, in The Wallis’s Bram Goldsmith Theater. Taylor, co-star of “The Nanny” television series and an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning writer and actress, looks back on a life full of memorable roles in Hollywood and on Broadway… and just as many fad diets. A self-described “diet junkie” who believed that if she ate like a star, she just might look and live like one, Taylor dishes out juicy anecdotes about — and weight loss tips from — such Hollywood legends as Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe and Barbra Streisand. She also serves up entertaining and poignant stories about the late Bologna, her partner in work and life for 52 years. Considered a comedy legend, she tells about her high and lows – on and off the scale – and shows audiences that the ability to laugh gets you through it all.
My Life on a Diet, originally directed by Bologna, made its New York premiere in 2018 with a critically acclaimed, extended run Off-Broadway at the Theatre at St. Clements and has embarked on a national tour. In November of last year, Taylor and My Life on a Diet won the annual United Solo Special Award for her significant contributions to solo theatre during the year. Critics have described My Life on a Diet as “fascinating, lighthearted, spicy” (New York Times), and as providing “laughs and unexpectedly tender moments” (Newsday). According to the New York Post, “The inimitable Renee Taylor’s new show is wonderful… an evening laced with love and laughter.”
MY LIFE ON A DIET
Critics
LemonMeter
Reviews: 5
Reviews
By Ernest Kearney — Watching Renée Taylor's one-woman show, My Life on a Diet, is akin to sitting on a veranda with the Statue of Liberty, after the two of you have knocked back a couple of bottles of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay and then settled in as that copper babe dishes the reality to you –
Now in her 80s, this adorable curly haired blonde reflects on how she was groomed by her wanna-be movie star mother to be the next Betty Hutton. Her momma encouraged her to lose weight starting at the age of 11. “My mother was concerned I was built like a sugar cube,” said Taylor, so she believed that if she ate like a star, she might look and live like one.
...Taylor keeps it personal, bringing authenticity, poignancy and ironic wit to the proceedings.
If timing is everything with comedy Renée Taylor in My Life on a Diet is proof positive. This revival of her one-woman show, based on her 1986 memoir of the same title, is a master class in getting laughs. She takes sentences that wouldn't necessarily be funny on the page and makes them soar, most enduringly with a running callback joke about how her mother would introduce herself to celebrities, reaching for a handshake, saying, “I'm Frieda.” Not funny when I write it down, hysterical by the time Ms. Taylor says it for the fifth or sixth time. Even her pauses are genius. Especially her pauses...
My jaw ached at the end from laughing so much. After a standing ovation she got a little teary. “All the love you give me when you laugh,” she says, “I feel that love and give it back to you.” She is a Hebrew National Treasure.
I have to admit I never stopped laughing througout the entire play.
By Ernest Kearney — Watching Renée Taylor's one-woman show, My Life on a Diet, is akin to sitting on a veranda with the Statue of Liberty, after the two of you have knocked back a couple of bottles of Krug Clos d'Ambonnay and then settled in as that copper babe dishes the reality to you –
Now in her 80s, this adorable curly haired blonde reflects on how she was groomed by her wanna-be movie star mother to be the next Betty Hutton. Her momma encouraged her to lose weight starting at the age of 11. “My mother was concerned I was built like a sugar cube,” said Taylor, so she believed that if she ate like a star, she might look and live like one.
...Taylor keeps it personal, bringing authenticity, poignancy and ironic wit to the proceedings.
If timing is everything with comedy Renée Taylor in My Life on a Diet is proof positive. This revival of her one-woman show, based on her 1986 memoir of the same title, is a master class in getting laughs. She takes sentences that wouldn't necessarily be funny on the page and makes them soar, most enduringly with a running callback joke about how her mother would introduce herself to celebrities, reaching for a handshake, saying, “I'm Frieda.” Not funny when I write it down, hysterical by the time Ms. Taylor says it for the fifth or sixth time. Even her pauses are genius. Especially her pauses...
My jaw ached at the end from laughing so much. After a standing ovation she got a little teary. “All the love you give me when you laugh,” she says, “I feel that love and give it back to you.” She is a Hebrew National Treasure.
I have to admit I never stopped laughing througout the entire play.