TV REVIEW : ‘Nunsense’ Still Faithfully Committed to Laughter

Musical-comedy fans who haven’t caught up with “Nunsense,” the spirited revue about five frolicsome nuns staging a song-and-dance benefit to raise money to bury four of their sisters lying in a convent freezer, have a wonderful opportunity to do so tonight. The show has its television premiere on A&E; at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.

Still running Off Broadway eight years after it opened, the stage show, in its warm tone and occasionally raucous satire, may be viewed as a cheerful precursor to the “Sister Act” movies, only much funnier. Taped before a theatrical audience, the TV production faithfully re-creates the theatergoing experience, right down to the nuns’ interplay with house patrons, including a funny encounter with a Jew mistaken by the entertainers for a Catholic.

Current and once-upon-a-time Catholic schoolgirls will appreciate Sister Mary Regina as the ruler-brandishing Mother Superior (richly performed by Rue McClanahan, who’s physically hilarious after accidentally sniffing an aphrodisiac). But there’s not a mean or caustic bone in the whole charming artifice (written and created by Dan Goggin and directed for TV by David Stern).

Like the original stage experience (brought to L.A. in 1988), the show is a bit corny, too dependent on one-liners and thin on plot, but it’s unquestionably terrific on a sheer performance level.

In the show, the stage-struck quintet from the Little Sisters of Hoboken gently squeeze the “parishioners” for burial money by explaining that they were off playing bingo when their colleagues expired face-down in their soup from tainted vichyssoise (prepared by nunnery Chef Julia, Child of God).

Joining McClanahan as the singing and dancing nuns are Terri White, Semina De Laurentis, Christine Anderson and Christine Toy. None of them is exactly Mary St. Ignatius, but they’re a lot more fun.