Chattanooga Times Free Press - ChattanoogaNow
‘Mark Twain Tonight!’ at Tivoli tomorrow
Hal Holbrook brings renowned one-man show to town
Actor Hal Holbrook will bring the longest-running show in American theater history to the Tivoli Theatre on Friday night, Sept. 23, when he presents his one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!”
“Mark Twain Tonight!” is a play created by Holbrook 62 years ago in which he depicts Mark Twain giving dramatic recitations selected from several of Twain’s writings, with an emphasis on comedy.
Holbrook, 91, was asked in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter how long he planned to keep touring with his show.
“I just regard myself as a part of a long, historical tradition, a very fine tradition of actors. People today don’t give a damn about that. They all want to be movie stars. I’m talking about the tradition of going out and working your ass off on the road, which is what actors have been doing for years.”
If you saw Holbrook 15 years ago when he brought this show to Chattanooga, don’t worry about seeing a repeat. The show never stops evolving as he adds new material. Three new sections have been added: one on the Christian Bible, another from the feuding clans in “Huckleberry Finn” killing each other off, and the third on the fate of the laboring class in America.
“Mark Twain never stops surprising me,” says Holbrook. “He keeps firing me up and asking questions.”
Holbrook developed the idea of an interview with Mark Twain while attending Denison University in the late 1940s. His first wife, Ruby, would interview him portraying famous people in history, of which Twain was one. Holbrook revised the concept into a one-man show in the 1950s, first performing the Mark Twain show in 1954. It premiered on Broadway in 1966. He later won a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play and an Emmy Award nomination for the 1967 television broadcast of it on CBS.
His many television roles included President Abraham Lincoln in “North and South,” Books 1 and 2; Capt. Lloyd Bucher on “Pueblo” and Sen. Hays Stowe on “The Bold Ones: The Senator,” all of which garnered him Emmy Awards. But he may be most associated with his recurring role as Reese Watson, boyfriend of Julia Sugarbaker (played by his third wife, the late Dixie Carter), on “Designing Women.”