Still plenty left to say
Lily Tomlin brings her character-oriented show to the gallo center for the arts
Lily Tomlin’s biography is so packed with roles she’s played, shows she’s staged and awards she’s won, it’s exhausting just to read.
She seems to have performed nonstop on television, stage and in movies since 1969 when she landed a role on the immensely popular “Laugh-In.”
Early on, the continuous work was a matter of survival.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Gallo Center for the Arts, 1000 I St., Modesto
Admission: $49-$99, available at the box office, open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mon.-Fri. and noon-6 p.m. Saturday, by calling (209) 338-2100 or (877) 488-3380 or galloarts.org/tickets
“I often made the joke when ‘Laugh-In’ ended that my act kept me from being a regular on ‘The Match Game,’ ” Tomlin said. “I had to make a living.”
Financial security isn’t the driving force that brings the versatile comedienne’s act to Modesto’s Gallo Center on Saturday. It’s that Tomlin still has some things to say.
“I love to perform,” Tomlin said during an hour-plus conversation. “I love to bring stuff to the audience that affirms our common experience, things I think are funny or telling or tender or quirky and fascinating. That’s what I loved about (her one-woman performance of Jane Wagner’s ‘The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe’). It was such an affirmation of our collective selves. my favorite line in a review from ‘The Search,’ and it doesn’t apply to this show, was, ‘At the end we were on our feet applauding our higher selves.’ It’s so validating.”
Tomlin’s ability to connect with her audience stems from the reality that she’s never lost touch with her roots as the child of parents from Kentucky who raised her in Detroit.
Her dad made car parts and in his off hours gambled on the ponies and drank.
“I went to church with my mother and to bars and bookie joints with my dad,” Tomlin said. “My dad delighted in me. He’d take me in a bar, set me on top and say, ‘Come on babe, sing,’ and I’d sing some silly thing.”
On Saturdays she’d go to the horse races with him.
Left to her own devices, Tomlin performed.
“I always had an act,” Tomlin said, “since I was a kid. I didn’t know it was an act. We lived in an old apartment house in Detroit, and I put on shows on the back porch. if I was lucky a neighbor would let me have a garage. I’d put up a stage, a piece of wood on sawhorses, which was a little treacherous, and hang drapes. I’d cast other kids, try to come up with stuff for other kids, but they wouldn’t show up and wouldn’t rehearse. I was mad to do a show.”
Still, when she graduated from high school she went off to Wayne State University with plans to major in medicine.
“I was never going to be a doctor,” Tomlin said.
She always knew she still had a show to do.
The one she brings to Modesto is a continuation of the one born so many years ago.
“It will still be character oriented, but much more informal and interactive with the audience. It’s Lily talking to the audience. oh no, I sound like Herman Cain,” Tomlin laughed at her unintentional third-person reference. “It will be me talking to the audience, talking about Modesto, talking about this big boat we’re all in together that may or may not have a repairable leak.”
Her material is fresh even if her most memorable characters, Ernestine and Edith Ann, are unchanged from their days on “Laugh-In.”
“Ernestine had a webcast show during the Bush administration,” Tomlin said. “She had plenty to say to Bush. She could get anyone on a conference call: Dick Cheney and Saddam Hussein. She’d give Bush a pep talk. When he was running against John Kerry, she told him, ‘Don’t worry about Kerry. He only served in a war. You started one.’ lately she’s weighed in on health care and insurance companies denying health care. She has communication skills. She’s a communications visionary. wherever the power is, she will go. just like a lot of Republican leaders, she espouses views she doesn’t really hold, just so she can browbeat and berate someone and have power over them.”
Tomlin’s material isn’t strictly political. nor is she limited to channeling the nosy operator or precocious 6-year-old. She’s proven adept at portraying any number of characters, from a harried, single working mom who fantasizes of being a Disney princess loved by every living creature in “9 to 5,” to a doctor dealing with an early case of AIDS in “And the Band Played on.”
Tomlin breathes life and humanity into any type of character, something director Robert Altman was the first to sense when he gave the television star her first movie role, casting her as the mother of deaf children who falls for singer Keith Carradine in 1975′s “Nashville.”
“Altman’s the only one who would put me in a part like that, or put me in the movies at that time,” Tomlin said. “You get pigeonholed. Especially in those days; you rarely crossed over from television to film.”
Tomlin was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for “Nashville” and in the years since has won Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards.
Her favorite place to perform, though, is on stage, because that’s where it all began.
She’ll settle into that comfort zone beginning at 8 p.m. Saturday in Modesto.
Contact reporter Lori Gilbert at (209) 546-8284 or lgilbert@recordnet.com.
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Tags: comedienne, continuous work, joke
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