EDITOR'S NOTE: This performance was part of the Tribune-Review's fall Broadway theater trip. NEW YORK — Such a love story, played from a single side as a reminiscence. "Say Goodnight, Gracie," at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre, is a layered valentine to one of the great show business couples, on and off stage, George Burns (1896-1996) and Gracie Allen (1902-64). Dozens of laughs fuel the story, and when it's too soon time to go home, the rippling senses of loss mount. She's gone, he's gone, and we won't see their like again. "Say Goodnight, Gracie" is Rupert Holmes' homage to the couple, acted from well beneath the skin as a one-man show by Pittsburgh native Frank Gorshin in a tour de force. It packs bountiful theatrical heart into 86 swift minutes. We were all of us only just getting acquainted. Holmes brackets the anecdotal evening in a hoary device that may have helped him structure the piece initially but that needed yanking out, like a soiled tablecloth, by the final draft. Burns, waylaid in limbo (or is it Buffalo, he jokes), addresses an accounting of his life to God while awaiting admission to heaven. The bookending sequence isn't bad — just corny and familiar. A lot of the rest is familiar, too, but necessary to the narrative. Burns (ne Nathan Birnbaum) was one of 14 children (12 of whom survived infancy) born to a poor couple of Polish and Austrian background in Manhattan's Lower East Side. Allen was born into Irish-American family. She was a practicing Catholic, he was "an out-of-practice Jew." She was his straight man for about 15 minutes until he figured out that she was funnier playing straight than he was with punch lines. They swapped roles between vaudeville performances and never switched back. He delivered bemused setups; she spoke in "illogic logic," a brand of reasoning that made perfect sense to her and none to anyone else. Because their vaudeville act consisted of character-driven conversation, they were unusually adaptable to radio, a medium that led to their success in movies and finally TV. But it was never so much what they did as how they did it. Gorshin vanishes into Burns instantly; for long stretches you forget that a skillfully acted impersonation is in progress. What Gorshin does isn't a stunt but a meticulously conjured characterization, informed by affection and respect. He takes the stage in a brown turtleneck and orange turtleneck, silvery hairpiece and owl horn rims. He walks briskly, stooped — his eyes twinkling as he uses cigars for pause and punctuation. As we see him, he's as old as he got to be — 100 years and 49 days. Holmes and Gorshin reinforce all previous impressions of Burns as a genuinely sweet guy to whom Jack Benny was a lifelong best friend and Gracie — or Google as he sometimes called her — the catch of a lifetime. The play includes brief clips from a few of Burns and Allen's earliest movies and a couple of TV appearances. Gorshin occasionally interacts with Didi Conn's prerecorded voicing of Allen. Slide projections illustrate bits of Burns' impoverished background. John Tillinger's invisible direction seldom catches Gorshin lighting long in any one place on John Lee Beatty's sparely decorated homey set. The key to the show is Burns' unfailing, self-effacing regard for his wife and the void her 1958 retirement and 1964 death caused. How keenly we share the loss when she's recalled with such affection by a guy everyone goes in loving. HOLMES DROPS BY Rupert Holmes, who wrote "Say Goodnight, Gracie," and who won Tony Awards for the book and score of "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," is polishing a Broadway-bound musical stage adaptation of the movie "Marty." He stopped by the Helen Hayes Theatre after a recent evening performance of "Say Goodnight, Gracie" to offer postscripts on his research into George Burns' Lower East Side upbringing and to field audience questions and compliments. Burns, he says, was dyslexic, a concept not yet understood in the early to mid-20th century. Because Burns feared erring when reading scripts on radio and cue cards on TV, he memorized everything. Burns was the architect and author of Gracie Allen's "illogical logic." Despite the fact Holmes' researched his subjects lives and watched and listened to hundreds of hours of Burns and Allen performances, he never met either. He earlier explored radio's heyday when he wrote 56 episodes over five years for American Movie Classics' made-for-cable TV series, "Remember When."

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