‘My Life On a Diet’: Renée Taylor dishes

‘MY LIFE ON A DIET’: Renée Taylor. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

MY LIFE ON A DIET
Written by Renée Taylor & Joseph Bologna
Directed by Joseph Bologna
Through September 2, 2018
Theatre at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th Street
(212) 239-6200
https://mylifeonadietplay.com/

By Scott Harrah

Renée Taylor—best known for her Emmy-nominated role as Sylvia Fine on TV’s “The Nanny”—reflects on her career, her lifelong battle with her weight while dishing celebrities and more in this initially funny one-woman show My Life On a Diet, co-written and directed by her late husband Joseph Bologna.

The first quarter of the 90-minute monologue is hysterical as she recalls growing up in the Bronx as Renée Wexler and then moving with her family to Miami Beach, discussing her outrageous, health-nut mother and her gambling father. She struggled with her weight starting at age 11 while idolizing movie stars. The family eventually moved back to New York City and, as she pursued work as an actress, she realized she was a “food tramp” but needed to stay thin if she wanted to make it big.

Ms. Taylor, now 85, admits she’s too old to move around the stage and mostly sits and glances at her script as she regales the audience with tales of her past, complete with slides to illustrate all the famous people she met. She went on every diet imaginable, and the diets are zany and absurd indeed, from those used by Jewish women on Long Island to an Italian nun.

After the entertaining opening anecdotes about her weight and childhood, the narrative becomes an endless series of name-dropping tales of everyone from Marilyn Monroe (she claims they both studied under the legendary Lee Strasburg) to Kim Novak and Grace Kelly, Marlon Brando and Cary Grant, doing a nightclub comedy routine at Le Bonsoir in the early 1960s (she says Barbra Streisand was her opening act), woven together with both old photos and clips from movies she appeared in, from The Errand Boy with Jerry Lewis to the Broadway show she wrote with her husband, Lovers and Other Strangers and the film adaptation in 1971 (for which she and Joe Bologna received a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination). She also played Eva Braun in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, but does not talk much about working with some of the legends in that classic film.

Sitting through My Life On a Diet is similar to being on a diet, craving something of real substance. Ms. Taylor has a fun personality and is lovable, but after listening to her monologue for awhile, one starts to question the chronology and factual accuracy of what she is discussing here. Case in point: She shows a photo she claims is of herself sitting on a Rolls Royce on Emmy night during the heyday of “The Nanny,” but the picture is clearly from the 1970s, not 1990s.

Granted, there’s no doubt Ms. Taylor and her late husband embellished some facts for the sake of humor, and it would be petty to take her to task on the facts and timeline for some of the material. However, much of the story is delivered by rote in a monotone voice, and without the slide presentations, the show itself might be nonexistent.

For an 85-year-old, Ms. Taylor certainly has spunk and delivers loads of laughs, but My Life On a Diet might have been more satisfying if she would have talked more about her “Nanny” years, given more details about her famous 53-year marriage instead of endless lame jokes, talked more about her children and given more insight into lessons learned from her own career and life and spent less time focusing on celebrity encounters. My Life On a Diet, while amusing and hilarious at times, ultimately leaves audiences hungry for something more structured, true and meaningful.

Edited by Scott Harrah
Published July 25, 2018
Reviewed at July 21, 2018 press preview performance.

‘MY LIFE ON A DIET’: Renée Taylor. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

‘MY LIFE ON A DIET’: Renée Taylor with projection of her late husband, Joseph Bologna. Photo: Jeremy Daniel.

‘MY LIFE ON A DIET’: Renée Taylor. Photo: Jeremy Daniel

‘MY LIFE ON A DIET’: Renée Taylor. Photo: Jeremy Daneil