Vicki Lawrence brings Mama back to Tucson

“Vicki Lawrence & Mama: A Two Woman Show,” starring ... Thelma Harper.

Yep, that’s right.

Vicki Lawrence might have top billing, but Thelma Harper — Mama to her legions of fans and knucklehead family members — is the headliner.

From the moment she conceived the show and launched it in 2001, Lawrence knew better than to upstage the cranky old-lady character she created 50 years ago on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

“Sometimes I think I could probably fall off the face of the earth and people wouldn’t care as long as Mama is still around,” Lawrence said during a phone call from her California home a few days before Christmas.

Lawrence is bringing Mama back to Tucson for the first time in 20 years for a show at Fox Tucson Theatre on Saturday, Jan. 11.

The show opens with Lawrence doing a few jokes and singing a medley of her hits (OK, she had only one, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”) and telling stories about her improbable life in Hollywood.

She was just 18 when Carol Burnett cast her to be part of her eponymous TV variety show. She stayed on through its nearly 11-year run on CBS from 1967-78, with castmates Burnett, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman.

The character of Thelma Harper, aka Mama, was part of “The Family” comedy sketch about Thelma Harper and her five children, including the troubled Eunice Higgins and her husband Ed.

The Mama character was actually written for Burnett, but “when she read the script, she said, ‘Mama is not the character that speaks to me. Eunice is,’” Lawrence said.

Perplexed, the writers turned to the producer and suggested Lawrence for the role.

“At that time, I had played many crazy old ladies on the show, you know, because it was Carol’s show,” recalled Lawrence, who was 24 when she started playing the elderly character. “She was always the ingénue, I was always the crazy old lady. If she was Cinderella, I was the witch. So at the time, it was just another old lady for me to play.”

Burnett threw another wrench into the writers’ plans when she proposed the family was Southern, even though they were based in the fictional town of Raytown, Kansas, straddling the Missouri state line. The writers and producers were concerned that doing the skit with Southern accents would anger half of the country.

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But instead of angering audiences, the skit, meant to be a one-time deal, got so much positive feedback that it and the characters became a signature of the show.

Lawrence said “The Family” characters became Burnett’s favorite on the show. When “The Carol Burnett” show ended in 1978, they developed a TV movie “Eunice” in 1982; Lawrence’s sitcom “Mama’s Family” followed in 1983 and ran through 1990.

Thanks to the magic of syndication, two generations of viewers have since become fans of the snarky old gal.

“They love her. They love her like she’s not me, like she’s another person and she’s just a rock star,” Lawrence said. “They love everything she has to say. And the audiences are incredible.”

Lawrence recalled one of her first two-woman shows at a casino in New Orleans not long after Katrina.

“I turned through one of the aisles, and there was this whole row of young, adorable guys. And I said, really? And they said, ‘Oh, my God, we wouldn’t have gotten through without Mama,’” she said. “They sort of learned me backwards. ... They were ‘Mama’s Family’ fans, but they would listen to my half of the show and, you know, just get all the backstory and where I came from. Then they’d come back to the show and say, ‘You were really hot when you were young.’ It was sort of like a weird ‘Back to the Future’ thing when the young people show up.”

After Lawrence’s opening, when she goes backstage to transform into Mama, the audience sees outtakes of the TV show before Mama reemerges.

But Mama in 2025 won’t be re-litigating all her rants from 50 years ago. Lawrence and her writing partner were careful to avoid making the live show a retrospective.

“I don’t want it to be like the Mama that everybody knows for sure from that show. I want her to be pushed into the new century,” she explained. “I want her (to be) the one that I try to keep more topical, you know, so that she can comment on all the crazy stuff that’s going on in the world, and for God’s sakes, it just keeps getting crazy.”

Lawrence said Mama resonates with today’s audiences because she represents a simpler time, when social media and cell phones and the internet didn’t exist.

“It just takes you away from real life a little bit,” she said.

“Vicki Lawrence & Mama: A Two Woman Show” begins at 7:30 p.m. Saturday at Fox Tucson Theatre, 17 W. Congress St. Tickets are $20-$72.50 through foxtucson.com.