Las Vegas Weekly

March 10, 2010 · 5:53 PM

Lily Tomlin returns to MGM’s Hollywood Theater tomorrow

By Robin Leach

Lily Tomlin performs at the MGM Grand's Hollywood Theater.

Photo: Tom Donoghue/www.donoghuephotography.com

Brilliant comedienne Lily Tomlin finally performed in Las Vegas last November for the first time in her long and illustrious 40-year-plus career. Now she’s back again, and it’s becoming a regular date on her calendar. Lily talked with us last October before her debut of Not Playing With a Full Deck at MGM Grand’s Hollywood Theater.

Our contributing photographer Tom Donoghue captured Lily onstage in November. I asked Lily as she got ready in L.A. for the new run starting tomorrow through March 17 if she knew this was going to turn into a regular gig.

She told me: “Maybe. We kind of had talked about it that I might do a certain number of weeks a year. Not a great number, but just four or five weeks or something. So, yes, I thought that was a true possibility. It was the first time in a long, long career that I wound up on a Las Vegas stage, and I was surprised at how well the audiences responded.”

She even confided: “I wasn’t sure I would really go over in Vegas.”

Lily once filmed a zany TV special here in a parody of Las Vegas. In one sequence of Sold Out, she was in male drag, and I suggested that with a regular run of new shows at MGM, it would allow her to bring back to life her smarmy, gushy male host. She said: “I would love to do that kind of stuff. I just have to get enough lead time. I would love to dress as Tommy, and I would love to have him come through a magic screen and open for me.”

Here’s a peek at 1981’s Sold Out on YouTube:

“I really enjoyed playing Las Vegas for the first time recently. I loved bringing Edith Ann’s chair with me. I have never had it onstage with me before, and then one night, Robin, I wish you would have been there, when I was doing Edith, you know I do the Q&A with the audience, and there was a lady ringside, and she started talking to Edith like a kid, and so I said, yes, “Do you want to come up here and play?” And she threw her leg right up on the stage and got right on the stage, and it was just fabulous, and I was thinking, ‘God I wish I could get someone like that ringside every night.’ I mean that stage is low enough, and she just threw her leg up and got right on there, and then we fooled around for a few minutes. She played like she was a kid, and it was really fun, and of course the audience got a real kick out of it.

“It will be a little different this time around, too. I am not going to have an opening act this time, and so I will be able to do a little more material, and not that I didn’t like my opening act. I love him, but this was just an opportunity for me since he is not available, and I said I would just do the show myself. I think because I am sort of acclimated now and I probably will fool around more, do improv more. I will also eat more often at the restaurants there on MGM’s Grand Walk. I love the sushi there!”

Lily said she’d forgotten to tell me what happened when she performed her MGM debut. It coincided with a big boxing fight. Her theater was used for a closed-circuit telecast for the event, which ran much later than planned, and her audience waited in line for 90 minutes. I don’t know of another star who would do it, but Lily went out and worked the line doing comedy with the crowds for more than an hour.

“My show was supposed to start at 9 p.m. instead of 8 p.m., but the fight still wasn’t over. So I went out in the lobby and I talked to everyone who was waiting in line, and of course all the waiters were like, “Oh, thank God, Lily, that you went and talked to the people so they wouldn’t be mad at us,’ ” she said.

“The people didn’t even get in till 10:30 because the fight went on, and it was just like Madison Square Garden. The fight crowd had left cups, beer cans on the floor and beer bottles everywhere, and the staff had to clean up the whole theater and the stage first before we could all go in.

“I went up and greeted each and every one at the door as they walked in. I mean I really felt sorry for them for having to wait so long. They were just fabulous, the people were so forgiving and really super, so that was kind of a special thing that happened during that run.

Photo: Darrin Bush/Las Vegas News Bureau

Lily Tomlin plays the new Ernestine's Ringy Dingy Reels Starring Lily Tomlin slot machine at the G2E Global Gaming Expo in the Las Vegas Convention Center on Nov. 18, 2009.

“I was pretty much inside MGM the entire time of the first visit, so I will definitely get out and about to see more of Las Vegas on this visit. I’ve already made plans to go to Lake Las Vegas and see what it’s like out there. I have a friend who is a Realtor who lives there. I want to ride the monorail because it looks great. I can catch it right at MGM. Someone told me that at the Wynn, there’s a golf course right in the middle of the city, so I want to see what that looks like. And I am going to go to the MGM spa more, and I am going to try and tour one of Tiger Woods’ suites. I got such a kick out of those women that Tiger was allegedly associated with when they talked about those nights in the VIP suites at the Mansion.”

I wanted to know if there would ever be a sequel to her hit 9 to 5 with Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton and Dabney Coleman. She told me: “They certainly tried for a long time, and now it would be out of our hands. It would be our daughters or something, a reincarnation. I know Jada Pinkett Smith for a while owned the movie rights and wanted to do an African-American cast, so I don’t know if it will ever happen. The movie marked a special point in American life. For a long time in the most recent past, Jane and Dolly, we talked about if we did it, the new film should be called 24/7 because people work around the clock when they are really ambitious. In the business world now, they work long, unstructured hours, or a really ambitious woman if she is trying to run a company or something.”

Photo: Tom Donoghue/www.donoghuephotography.com

Lily Tomlin and Robin Leach onstage at the MGM Grand with the original Edith Ann rocking chair from Laugh-In on Nov. 10, 2009.

Lily says she has two more episodes of Glenn Close’s award-winning FX drama Damages to shoot before the season ends. “My character is getting really fun and interesting. The creators have really given me an opportunity to play a dramatic role. I rarely get an opportunity to play a dramatic role, and they gave me a really great role to play, kind of like a Ruth Madoff character and the family. Damages is a very exciting and unpredictable show, and it’s really fun to play a bad girl.”

She summed up about her MGM show: “It is different every night in some respect as a new show. There is always something different. I will do some monologues, but in between, I like to fool around. And I will definitely do some material that wasn’t seen last time.”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach.

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Follow VDLX Editor Don Chareunsy on Twitter at Twitter.com/VDLXEditorDon.

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