The Golden Girls' Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia Are Headed to Dallas

Even in these times of conflict, there are still a few things we can all agree are awesome: videos of puppies and kittens getting along like best buddies, the snug and warm feeling when you put on a new pair of socks — or thinking about Tom Hanks.

The beloved sitcom The Golden Girls also fits into that category. Even if you've never seen a single episode, you've heard of at least one of the characters or know that Blanche Devereaux, played by Rue McClanahan, is the flirty one.

A new touring show called Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue is coming to the AT&T Performing Arts Center. It's a new episode performed live on stage by an all-male cast playing Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia the way McClanahan, Bea Arthur, Betty White and Estelle Getty, respectively, would, if the cameras were still rolling.

The Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue will run for eight performances at the Wyly Theatre from Tuesday, Jan. 30 through Sunday, Feb. 4. Times are 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday – Thursday; 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets range from $40.75 to $75.

The cast includes stage actors Ryan Bernier as Dorothy, Vince Kelley as Blanche, Adam Graber as Rose and Christopher Kamm as Sophia. Jason Bowen rounds out the cast with dual roles as Burt and as Dorothy's ex-husband Stanley (played in the original show by Herb Edelman). Presumably, the role of "Burt" refers to actor Burt Reynolds, who played himself in a memorable episode from the second season of the NBC sitcom.  The Golden Girls: The Laughs Continue isn't just a shot-for-shot recreation of the original TV series' episodes that ran 1985–1992. The show invents a completely original episode that takes place in the present. It was written by Texas native Robert Leleux, who has published two best-selling memoirs including The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, about his childhood in East Texas, and The Living End: A Memoir of Forgetting and Forgiving.

The show portrays Miami's four most famous retirees picking up with their lives right after the final episode (if you omit the fact that Dorothy married Leslie Nielsen). Sophia has returned to the Miami house after doing a stint in prison for running a drug ring for retired people. Blanche and Rose have created a new dating service for seniors called CreakN that's on the verge of turning them into the most successful retirees in town. Dorothy is dating "a new (much) younger, sex-crazed lover," according to the press release.

They've even re-creating the ladies' familiar Miami home — as much as could be fit on a stage — from the palm foliage to the floral wicker chairs in the living room. They've even got those copper cake pans on the wall in the kitchen that no one in the history of cuisine has ever used to make a chicken-shaped cake.

The Golden Girls isn't the first classic TV show to get the live theater experience treatment. The early '90s saw a stage production that re-created TV's most nuclear family. The Real Live Brady Bunch had future stars Jane Lynch and Andy Richter as Carol and Mike Brady. Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants was turned into a big-time Broadway musical in 2017, earning 12 Tony nominations the following year. This isn't even the first Golden Girls stage production. That Golden Girls Show! ran off-Broadway last year as an all-puppet re-creation of Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia.

The fun of the original show is watching how the four ladies' various stories converge as they sit around that floral kitchen table talking about the absurd banality of their lives as they each take on a quarter of a whole cheesecake. Dorothy is the sarcastic one who always seems to have a snide, hilarious quip in a shoulder holster. Blanche is the flirtatious sexpot who lives the "life begins at 50" mantra to an extreme. Rose is the ditzy but deceptively wise one from a small town called St. Olaf, Minnesota, that sounds like the first draft for the town in the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. Sophia is the sassy elder who doesn't seem to have any volume control.

The Golden Girls was one of those shows that anyone could watch because they relate so well to pretty much every friendship. There's a Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia in every friend group regardless of age, gender or employment status. The comedy's bold humor and focus on the lives of women characters certainly paved the ways for shows like Sex and the City.

The show is been rediscovered by new generations of TV viewers, even as reruns become more of an antiquated concept than the buggy whip and the hand-operated butter churn. The characters' bracing openness will make it particularly exciting to see what happens when the girls' dialogue comes from actors and writers from an entirely  new generation.