Lily Tomlin Mixes It Up In Multifaceted Show - Hartford Courant
Hey, Lily Tomlin fans, Ernestine is coming to town this week. But she's not a bossy, nasty telephone operator any more. She's a bossy, nasty claims processor for a health-insurance company.
"She's worked lots of jobs since the divestiture [of AT&T]. She's not going to stay working in some kind of submissive or pleasing position," Tomlin said in a phone interview from Buffalo, N.Y., where she was performing recently. "She doesn't want to be nice. She wants to have power. She wants to dominate. She goes where she has the last word."
So, of course, she denies all claims and belittles all callers. "You've had 200 tests? You should have stopped at one," Tomlin snarks, in character. "You got shot in the subway? Maybe next time you should get shot in the Quiznos."
Tomlin brings her multi-faceted, multi-media comedy show to the Calvin Theater in Northampton on Friday, May 4.
Insurance claim denials is Ernestine's third major job; since leaving her iconic phone-operator position, she also has hosted a web chat show.
"She did that all during the Bush administration. It was called 'Ernestine calls you on it, you'd better have an answer.' She would call the president or the vice president or Donald Rumsfeld, anyone, and try to broker peace or something like that," she said. "She might give a pep talk to Bush about running against Kerry. 'You don't have to worry about Sen. Kerry. He only served in a war. You started one'."
Tomlin said she would never be able to get away from a live show without doing Ernestine, Edith Ann and all her other beloved characters. But she mixes it up. In addition to her characters — others she has created include lounge lizard Tommy Velour, housewife Judith Beasley, Trudy the bag lady and elderly blues cat Sister Boogie Woman — she shows film clips and interacts with the audience. "I talk about Northampton a little, talk about our common experience of living on the planet," she said. "I like to think of the show filmically. I can take you to another place. You can come along for the trip."
Tomlin, a politically savvy comic, says there always is fodder for new material — "my God, it's unbelievable what people say and do" — and this election year is no exception. "This morning, Mitt Romney was talking at some college about student tuition and he's saying something like 'you must go to college, get a job in high school, work while you're in college, and if you don't have enough money, ask your parents'." (Romney has been criticized for not taking into consideration students whose parents have no money.)
No subject matter is too grim for comedy, Tomlin said. "You depend on inspiration to handle it well," she said. "I created this character, a quadriplegic, Crystal the Terrible Tumbleweed. She's on her way to Big Sur to go hand-gliding, and she's saying 'You walkers have to think about hurting yourselves, I'm just out for a good time.' It's a very affirming piece."
Tomlin, 72, a native of Detroit, first came to fame in the mid-'60s in New York City comedy clubs and TV talk shows, but became a superstar in 1969 by joining the cast of the mega-TV hit "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In." She later starred in a series of comedy specials co-written by her longtime companion Jane Wagner, and went on to star in comic and dramatic TV movies and theatrical movies and a nationwide tour of the smash Broadway show "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," written by Wagner.
Tomlin has won, or been nominated for, every imaginable award, including Emmys, Tonys, a CableAce Award, a Grammy, two Peabody Awards, a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a Writers Guild of America Award, and a New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics award — and an Oscar nomination — for her role as a gospel singer in "Nashville."
Tomlin says that through her 40-plus years in comedy, "our common experience of living on the planet" doesn't change. Only the terminology does. "With teenagers, the language changes maybe, but not their insouciant tone. It used to be 'duh' and now it's something else, but that contempt for their parents, the banal grown-ups, is still there.
"No matter how much technological progress there is," she said, "humans don't progess that much."
AN EVENING WITH LILY TOMLIN will be at the Calvin Theater, 19 King St. in Northampton, Mass., on Friday, May 4, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $57.50 and $47.50. Details: http://www.iheg.com.
Lily Tomlin Mixes It Up In Multifaceted Show - Hartford Courant
Hey, Lily Tomlin fans, Ernestine is coming to town this week. But she's not a bossy, nasty telephone operator any more. She's a bossy, nasty claims processor for a health-insurance company.
"She's worked lots of jobs since the divestiture [of AT&T]. She's not going to stay working in some kind of submissive or pleasing position," Tomlin said in a phone interview from Buffalo, N.Y., where she was performing recently. "She doesn't want to be nice. She wants to have power. She wants to dominate. She goes where she has the last word."
So, of course, she denies all claims and belittles all callers. "You've had 200 tests? You should have stopped at one," Tomlin snarks, in character. "You got shot in the subway? Maybe next time you should get shot in the Quiznos."
Tomlin brings her multi-faceted, multi-media comedy show to the Calvin Theater in Northampton on Friday, May 4.
Insurance claim denials is Ernestine's third major job; since leaving her iconic phone-operator position, she also has hosted a web chat show.
"She did that all during the Bush administration. It was called 'Ernestine calls you on it, you'd better have an answer.' She would call the president or the vice president or Donald Rumsfeld, anyone, and try to broker peace or something like that," she said. "She might give a pep talk to Bush about running against Kerry. 'You don't have to worry about Sen. Kerry. He only served in a war. You started one'."
Tomlin said she would never be able to get away from a live show without doing Ernestine, Edith Ann and all her other beloved characters. But she mixes it up. In addition to her characters — others she has created include lounge lizard Tommy Velour, housewife Judith Beasley, Trudy the bag lady and elderly blues cat Sister Boogie Woman — she shows film clips and interacts with the audience. "I talk about Northampton a little, talk about our common experience of living on the planet," she said. "I like to think of the show filmically. I can take you to another place. You can come along for the trip."
Tomlin, a politically savvy comic, says there always is fodder for new material — "my God, it's unbelievable what people say and do" — and t
his election year is no exception. "This morning, Mitt Romney was talking at some college about student tuition and he's saying something like 'you must go to college, get a job in high school, work while you're in college, and if you don't have enough money, ask your parents'." (Romney has been criticized for not taking into consideration students whose parents have no money.)
No subject matter is too grim for comedy, Tomlin said. "You depend on inspiration to handle it well," she said. "I created this character, a quadriplegic, Crystal the Terrible Tumbleweed. She's on her way to Big Sur to go hand-gliding, and she's saying 'You walkers have to think about hurting yourselves, I'm just out for a good time.' It's a very affirming piece."
Tomlin, 72, a native of Detroit, first came to fame in the mid-'60s in New York City comedy clubs and TV talk shows, but became a superstar in 1969 by joining the cast of the mega-TV hit "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In." She later starred in a series of comedy specials co-written by her longtime companion Jane Wagner, and went on to star in comic and dramatic TV movies and theatrical movies and a nationwide tour of the smash Broadway show "The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe," written by Wagner.
Tomlin has won, or been nominated for, every imaginable award, including Emmys, Tonys, a CableAce Award, a Grammy, two Peabody Awards, a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, a Writers Guild of America Award, and a New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics award — and an Oscar nomination — for her role as a gospel singer in "Nashville."
Tomlin says that through her 40-plus years in comedy, "our common experience of living on the planet" doesn't change. Only the terminology does. "With teenagers, the language changes maybe, but not their insouciant tone. It used to be 'duh' and now it's something else, but that contempt for their parents, the banal grown-ups, is still there.
"No matter how much technological progress there is," she said, "humans don't progess that much."
AN EVENING WITH LILY TOMLIN will be at the Calvin Theater, 19 King St. in Northampton, Mass., on Friday, May 4, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $57.50 and $47.50. Details: http://www.iheg.com.