Lily Tomlin worries about a whole mélange of things. She worries about Facebook and Twitter. She worries about identity theft. She worries about reality shows. But in Overture Hall last night, she didn't worry one whit about a little technical snafu.
Applause turned to anxious groans when the video and audio on a prerecorded montage that introduced the 70-year-old comedian started to cut out, and the atmosphere got mildly tense: How would Tomlin react?
Gracefully, it turned out -- though she went about it in a (deliberately) clumsy way. The Academy Award nominee faux-stammered through a series of nearly incomprehensible apologies, drawing laughs and demonstrating the professionalism that's kept her a star for more than 40 years, as well as her irresistible air of self-deprecation. "I was so worried all day that, that -- that you might not show up tonight," she finished her opening monologue.
If she really had been worried, the crowd's emphatically positive response would have convinced her she needn't have been. Throughout the 90-minute show, as Tomlin shifted in and out of various characters and from one monologue to the next, she maintained a genuinely empathetic connection with the audience, such that early on, when a bad cough forced her to break character for a sip of water, it added a sense of delightful chaos to the performance rather than detracting from it. ("I've had a bit of a quinsy in my throat," she quipped.)
Other than that, Tomlin was in straight-up excellent shape, burbling with energy and, as 6-year-old Edith Ann -- one of her most famous personae, whose appearance was greeted with an uproar -- bouncing and bobbing across the stage. She rarely stopped moving.
The jokes themselves tended not to be quite so sprightly -- most of the audience sported gray (or no) hair -- but aside from the occasional allusion to the likes of Ma and Pa Kettle, the material was more or less timeless. Tomlin's patter ranged from classically absurd (her bit about becoming a star but never making it as a waitress) to goofy (a piece about "rubber freak" Lucille, who couldn't stop eating erasers) to the sort of thoughtful musings that also made her late peer George Carlin famous.
For instance: "The problem with the rat race is, even if you win, you're still a rat." Now, to those of us in the crowd who were a little younger, some of those lines seemed a little lazy, like a once-great star trotting out Borscht Belt chestnuts. "But then I thought about it," my wife said, "and I realized Lily Tomlin probably was the person who said that first." (According to most online sources, indeed, she was.)
Tomlin didn't hold the audience in the palm of her hand the whole time. A non-comical bit about a rich lady and a poor lady was received with silence and murmurs, and she quickly moved on. And a tiny bit of tension flew back into the room when her infamous telephone operator Ernestine appeared and said she had a new job in the health-care industry. (Realizing a joke about preexisting conditions didn't work anymore, as of this week, she deadpanned, "I know I'm going to have to make some adjustments.") But even when she didn't have the hall teeming with hilarity -- and mostly, she did -- Tomlin was fascinating to watch at work.
