Sally Struthers in "Nunsense"

Sally Struthers (Babette on Gilmore Girls) keeps very busy with her theater projects, the latest of which is Nunsense. Nunsense is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a national tour, with its next stop tomorrow at the Paramount Theatre in Aurora.

Nunsense is a musical comedy written by Dan Goggin – the original production was inspired by a line of greeting cards. The original production ran off-Broadway in 1985, where it lasted for 3,672 performances – the second-longest off-Broadway show in history! The show is an International sensation with more than 6,000 productions worldwide.

The story of Nunsense follows 5 Little Sisters of Hoboken who had run missionary leper colony in France. The story revolves around one of their number accidentally killing 52 nuns of the convent with tainted food. Mother Superior (Sally Struthers) then has a vision to start a greeting card company to raise money for the burials.

Mother Superior then spends part of the money they earn on the cards to buy a VCR, and they are left without funds to bury 4 of the deceased. So the next idea is to hold a variety show, with acts from a variety of comedic nuns. The play has evolved over the years, and Dan Goggin personalized the Mother Superior role in this anniversary tour just for Sally. There are some lines that refer back to her time on All in the Family, for example.

Sally has been enjoying the part immensely:

“It’s a great show. It’s a real creative pleasure. There are six other women in this show, and they all deserve to be household names like me.”

She goes on to say that acting the show is like a “two-hour-long variety show with all of us wearing nuns’ habits,” in this dark comedy play. The variety show sounds like a lot of fun, and gets a lot of laughs at the end of the night.

The Nunsense tour started in September and runs through January – you can view a list of the cities on tour here.

Images: Paramount Theatre & Amazon, Info via Wikipedia, TriCities, Daily Herald