There are very few sitcoms that make me honest-to-God fall out of my chair. The Golden Girls has been one of them since I watched it first-run as a teen in the 1980s.

A friend of mine wanted to treat me to an evening out—and when she saw That Golden Girls Show!: A Puppet Parody was coming to The Palace in Waterbury, she surprised me with tickets.

I wanted to write a specific review to encourage everyone to go if it comes to a nearby city, but this 80-minute show, composed of three “episodes,” is honestly more fun if you go into it blind. There are some awesome surprises beyond just the show itself, and if I mention any of them, I feel I’m doing potential theatergoers a disservice. So I’ll just say this: it was like getting to have the best slice of cheesecake you’ve ever had in your life a second time years later.

Although I own the whole series on DVD and have watched reruns over the years, there was nothing like feeling as though the Fab Four were alive again. The Avenue Q-style puppets were well-manipulated; all four actors were expert, and Dorothy and Blanche, in particular, were stand-outs, perfectly mimicking down to timbre, inflections, and pronunciations of certain words.

One of the fears I had going into this was that it would be a “contemporary” update. Thankfully, I only caught one joke that commented on something going on in the world today, and it burst the nostalgic bubble—but only for a moment. There was one other thing that was added that is in character and is—well, that’s one of the surprises. Just fear not.

The humor is exactly what it was in the original show—raunchy, but absolutely requires your imagination to fill in the blanks. Nothing is diluted; the burns and the inappropriate comments are intact. I don’t know if the whole script was lifted from real episodes, but I definitely recognized a few classic one-liners, and just like with the original series, I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe in some spots.

That said, this production is likely going to attract crowds who know and love the original show. I’m guessing over half of our packed house was Gen-Xers, and that made the experience a joyride—there was definitely group bonding happening during the course of the performance, and I’d expect that’s going to be present in future dates.

If you want to escape your life for a little bit, have a good laugh and take a trip down memory lane, I can’t recommend this enough. The show tours the US through April of 2022. Here’s the schedule: https://thatgoldengirlsshow.com/us-tour/ I’ll also say that tickets through Ticketmaster/Telecharge/Whatever were more expensive for less appealing seats, so it might be better to try to order from your theater directly if you have that option.

In the meantime, here are some of the best of The Golden Girls series’ zingers, courtesy of TVLand: https://youtu.be/y2wvi9LT-OY

Thank you for being a friend!