Stephanie Powers as Tallulah in 'Looped'

Many of us from the TV generation, that's the decades the babyboomers were busy with their regular TV shows, will remember Stephanie Powers.

It might be from The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Feather and Father Gang or Hart to Hart.  If you were a fan, you can see her live at the Hippodrome through March 17 in the play Looped, based on the life of Tallulah Bankhead.

Of course, to remember the mercurial Tallulah you might have to be at least in your 50s. She died in 1968 after a career in the movies and on stage. Her most notable piece of work was the Hitchcock film Lifeboat from 1944.

The play is set in a recording studio in Los Angeles in 1965. All she had to do was go in, record one line of dialogue, and that would have been it. Not so fast, and not so easy.

It took her the better part of a day to do it. Interruptions caused by some alcohol, drugs, her attention span and simply because she had nothing better to do that day. 

The play is basically a two-person show, though an engineer has the third part, a minor one indeed. The second lead character is Danny, the engineer, who didn't like Tallulah from the beginning and those feelings only grew stronger as the day went on.

Eventually they would both open up to each other. The play had its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in 2008. It wound up on Broadway in 2010, in a rather limited run.

Miss Powers replaced Valerie Harper, who was originally signed for the part.  Unfortunately a serious illness forced her out of the show. The title could be serve to have two meanings. When one is looped, there's alcohol involved. When an actor is doing looping, they are adding or replacing dialogue to a film, usually in a studio while watching a video.

Miss Powers seems to have the affectations necessary to play this role, the voice and the body movement. With an intermission the play runs two hours. I'm not really sure if the younger theater patrons will appreciate the play.

Maybe there are too many years between Tallulah and their birth. But on the other hand, I did see a number of folks in the house looking to be in their 30s.

If you simply enjoy going to theater, then you might just enjoy watching Stephanie Powers.

Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8, Saturday at 2 and Sunday at 1 and 6:30. For info, visit the performace website.