Vicki Lawrence is bringing Vicki Lawrence & Mama: A Two-Woman Show to the George Street Playhouse in the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center on Nov. 13 and 14, 2026, a limited two-night run that marks the 25th anniversary of her road show.
For Lawrence, the timing fits a show that has always leaned on the life she has lived. She said her half of the performance is largely autobiographical because so many crazy things have happened to her, while Mama is the character who lets her say what people want to say but are too polite to say. She has also said she wanted the show, when it began, to give audiences 90 minutes away from the world and make them laugh.
That instinct traces back to the beginning. Lawrence made her debut on The Carol Burnett Show in 1967 when she was still a teenager, after Carol Burnett saw her win the Miss Fireball of Inglewood contest and wanted her to play her sister. Lawrence has said CBS only had The Carol Burnett Show on the schedule for six weeks, but the show grew into a hit and kept going until 1978, giving her the platform that turned Mama, also known as Thelma Harper, into a signature role.
The road to that opening was already unusual. While in high school in Inglewood, California, Lawrence toured with The Young Americans and performed at the Oscars, meeting Johnny Mathis, Louis Armstrong and Henry Mancini along the way. That kind of start helps explain why she describes her career as something that happened almost by accident, then kept expanding once the audience caught up.
The friction in her story is that the show she says was only expected to last six weeks became the foundation of her career. Mama later carried over into Mama's Family on NBC in 1983, and Lawrence has kept returning to the character in a format built for live crowds. In 1973 she also sang The Nights the Lights Went Out in Georgia, a #1 hit she has said was written by her husband at the time, and she has said she did the demo before the song took off.
Now she is bringing that history back onstage in New Brunswick. The two performances at George Street Playhouse are the next stop for a show Lawrence says still feels the same 25 years on, because the material is hers, the character is hers, and the laugh she is chasing is still the point.
