Be glad to spend time with Carol Burnett

When a performer is a time-honored favorite, extraordinarily talented, or both, fans often long to know more about her.

Carol Burnett — a beloved show business legend for more than 50 years — is giving Honolulu fans that opportunity. When Burnett takes the stage Friday and Saturday at the Blaisdell Concert Hall, she’ll welcome questions from the audience.

“At the beginning of my show on television, I’d talk to the audience and took questions as myself before I went into all these different characters — and that’s what I do now,” Burnett said, calling from her home in Southern California last month.

“It’s a conversation that I have with the audience,” she said. “There are no planted questions or anything. We just bring up the lights and people raise their hands — and it’s, “OK, the lady in the second row with the pink,” and there’ll be an usher there with a microphone so that whatever she says, the audience can hear.

“I have to be on my toes because I don’t know what anybody is going to say or do and so I’m kind of flying without a net,” she said. “But that’s what makes it more fun.”

Asked for an example of a particularly unusual question, Burnett mentioned one she got about 10 years ago: “If you could be a member of the opposite sex for 24 hours and then pop back into being yourself again, who would you be and what would you do?”

“You have to remember it happened about 10 years ago,” Burnett said. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, who would I want to be?’ I said a little prayer and said, ‘OK, Lord, I’m going to open my mouth and whatever comes out is going to be your fault’ — and I swear, I didn’t know I was going to say this until I said it — I said, ‘I would be Osama Bin-Ladin, and I’d kill myself.’”

“The audience went crazy, and I said, ‘Thank you, God.’ It was surreal. I had no idea I was going to say it until it came out.”

If you want to ask Burnett about her favorite moment working with Tim Conway or Vicki Lawrence — or with Garry Moore or Buddy Hackett back in the 1950s — that’s OK too. If you want to ask about the origin of Burnett’s Tarzan yell, however, you should be prepared to do your own version of it.

Consider that fair warning!

BURNETT’S STAGE show is also embellished with video of talk, comedy and music from “The Carol Burnett Show,” which ran from 1967 to 1978 on CBS.

“I intersperse the evening with clips of some of the best Q&As we’ve had, and some of the musical performances, and then some of the movie takeoffs that we did, so it’s not talk all the way through,” Burnett said. “I’ll do Q&As and then introduce a clip and then I’ll come back and do more Q&A.

“People say, ‘Why are you doing it?’ Well, it keeps the old gray matter fresh.”

Burnett’s earliest credits as a television star, Broadway and television performer, writer and recording artist date from the mid-1950s. Although she is best known for her groundbreaking comedy variety show, she has achieved success across the spectrum of modern American entertainment.

Her ties to Hawaii also go back decades. She joined Jim Nabors, a friend she first worked with on his television show “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C” in the mid-1960s, in a locally produced television special, “Christmas in Hawaii,” in 1981. In 1992, Burnett returned to star opposite Tom Selleck in “Love Letters” at Diamond Head Theatre.

She also had a recurring role as Steve McGarrett’s Aunt Debbie in the re-boot version of “Hawaii Five-0,” appearing in three episodes, beginning in 2013. Her character was written out of the show in 2016.

Asked about her character Aunt Debbie’s death from cancer, Burnett said she didn’t know why she died.

”I did three shows, and I guess they thought they had exhausted her,” Burnett said. “I really loved working with the crew. Alex O’Loughlin was so special. We did a lot of scenes together and he’s just terrific.”

Death has touched Burnett in tangible ways in recent years. Conway died on May 14, 2019, and this is her first show in Hawaii since Nabors’ death in 2017.

“It’s bittersweet,” she said of visiting Hawaii and not seeing Nabors. “We go back over 50 years. He was like a brother to me; he’s my little daughter’s godfather, so that’s a longtime friendship.”

Looking back to her stage time at Diamond Head Theatre, Burnett said that it was fun to work with Selleck, describing “Love Letters” as “a wonderful play.”

“I’ve done it about nine or 10 times,” she said, with Leslie Nielson, Charlton Heston and Brian Dennehy as some of her dramatic partners. “Everybody was different, and the combinations make it different for the audience too. The most recent time I did it was in New York with Brian Dennehy.”

Hawaii got a sample of Burnett’s talent as a playwright in 2013 when The Actors’ Group presented her semi-autobiographical dramedy, “Hollywood Arms,” which was based on her experiences growing up in a rundown Hollywood apartment with her alcoholic mother and no-nonsense grandmother.

Burnett co-wrote the script with her oldest daughter, Carrie Hamilton; Hamilton died 10 months before the show opened on Broadway on Halloween night, 2002.

“It was a great experience working with Carrie, and then working with Hal Prince, who directed it for Broadway,” Burnett said. “It was quite an adventure for me, and it was pretty true. Everything we wrote actually happened.”

CAROL BURNETT: AN EVENING OF LAUGHTER AND REFLECTION

>> Where: Blaisdell Concert Hall

>> When: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday

>> Cost: $65-$125

>> Info: 745-3000, ticketmaster.com