E-Mail This Article to a Friend Amazing Gracie Frank Gorshin channels George Burns BY MARK BAZER

Frank Gorshin is what you’d call an old-school entertainer. Though he’ll forever live on in syndication as the Riddler in the ’60s TV show Batman, Gorshin for years did the Vegas nightclub-act thing, singing, telling jokes and stories, and, most memorably, doing impressions of such stars as Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Richard Burton.

But for the last three years, Gorshin has been doing only one 90-minute impression — the ultimate old-school entertainer himself, George Burns. Beginning October 21, Gorshin will light up a stogie at the Wilbur Theatre, where he plays a two-week run as the vaudeville/radio/TV/film comic legend in Rupert Holmes’s Tony Award-nominated Say Goodnight Gracie.

It’s a one-man show — of sorts. Gorshin, costumed as Burns in his cuddly octo/nonagenarian days, shares the stage with a video screen that projects actual clips from Burns’s life, including performances with longtime wife and comic partner Gracie Allen. Didi Conn, the beauty-school dropout of the 1978 film Grease, supplies the offstage voice of Gracie.

"When I found out they were going to [have the video], my tendency was to say, ‘Wait a minute, hold it,’" Gorshin says in his smoker’s voice, on the phone from his hotel in Los Angeles. "I didn’t want people looking at George up there on the screen and then looking at me and thinking, he does or doesn’t look like George. It was intimidating. But it’s all come along nicely."

Nicely enough for Gorshin to have won the 2003 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Solo Performance. Some audience members, Gorshin says, have even commented that they think he’s channeling Burns from the beyond. "It’s flattering to hear that, but I don’t suspect that at all," Gorshin says. "It’s just another impression I do."

Doing Burns had never been a part of Gorshin’s nightclub act. "I just didn’t want to do him because everybody was doing him," he says. But then a movie offer to play Burns came along. "They asked me if I could do it. I said, ‘Yeah, I can do it.’ I did so many people, I thought somewhere down the line I’m going to play somebody’s life, and it turns out to be someone I hadn’t done." The movie was never released, but it left Gorshin with a new impression — and word of it eventually got to Say Goodnight Gracie producer William I. Franzblau.

For those looking for advice on getting into the impression business, Gorshin admits he can share little insight. "I wish I could articulate [how he learned to do Burns]. It’s just an instinctive thing I found myself doing on stage as far as moving my finger and playing with the cigars. It wasn’t anything that was deliberated. It just happened in the performing of it."

Gorshin, though, does relate how he helped add one small but important aspect to the script. "The initial script, it had [Burns] so lily-white," he says. "I thought, this is terrific, but he’s got to be fallible in some way."

And so he convinced Franzblau and playwright Holmes (a Tony winner for his musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood) to let him try incorporating a story about Burns’s philandering into the show. It helped that the philandering story has a funny ending — as, of course, so many philandering stories do.

"I did it, and it got such a great reaction, and all of a sudden, that one thing that was missing suddenly wasn’t missing anymore. It showed him as a little bit capable of being a bad boy, too, which all of us identify with, and it made him human. It was a keeper then."

Say Goodnight Gracie is at the Wilbur Theatre October 21 through November 2. Tickets are $25 to $67, available at the Wilbur box office or through Ticketmaster at 617-931-2787.