(Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune) Holland Taylor, the classy, Emmy Award-winning actress, met Dorothy Ann Willis Richards, the twinkly-eyed former governor of Texas, only briefly. “But when she died,” Taylor said over coffee recently, “I remained upset for months as though she were someone personally important to me.”

More than anything, Taylor says, that feeling led to the new one-woman show arriving in Chicago this weekend for a pre-Broadway tryout (the show does not yet have an announced Broadway theater for the spring, but that remains the current plan). “Ann” has already been seen in a couple of venues in Texas; it was first seen in Galveston last December. Taylor got this show going in Galveston and, subsequently, at the Paramount Theatre in Austin using much of her own money.