Betty

Review re-"printed" from www.LATheatreReview.com: It is undeniable that Kellydawn Malloy, the buxom blonde portraying Paramount starlette Betty Hutton in the play by the same name, has a good deal of charm. During a fake press conference (in which the audience plays the Media), Malloy smiles her way through life stories riddled with dysfunctional marriages, casting couches (or in this case, trains), and performances on table tops for bootleggers. USO tours and tales from Hollywood studio's heydays paint a romantic landscape for the rambunctious star to rise and fall. The piece is almost a hit, but the meandering structure (due as much to random audience participation as Malloy's tendency to seem flustered and forgetful) deflate the winsom... full review

When it hit me that Kellydawn Malloy has no idea which of the stories she will tell in recounting Hutton's life (some of them emotionally hefty) until the audience members, playing press, asked questions at random from a long list, I was even more impressed with this show. The actor has be *really* strong to be able to range between pep and heartbreak without benefit of safely following a script that controls/guides the whole. At the show I saw, the final one, an audience member threw out a really good, sincere question that unfortunately wasn't on any list! Malloy seamlessly framed it so that it perfectly fit one of the list topics, and rolled. I watched the woman who made the query as Malloy answered via performance. She was as satisf... full review