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The Powerhouse – Wed Mar 2
Lily Tomlin has had a long career in television, playing characters that range from the wacky to the absurd; she can bounce off Dolly Parton for punch lines, or tie herself into existentialist knots in a film like I Heart Huckabees, but tonight, she’s here to do stand-up. She spends the bulk of the show switching between anecdotes from her own life and character bits from her years on television, and indeed, you don’t actually realise what a gifted comic actress she is until you see her inhabit these with her own body. Classic characters who come out include precocious five-year-old Edith Ann, and vengeful telephone operator Ernestine, who these days is working for a health insurer and gleefully denying coverage to everyone. The most satisfying bits, though, are the stories from Tomlin’s own experience; like any skilled memoirist, she mixes humour with pathos, reflecting on her Detroit upbringing, a crush she had on an elementary school teacher and on her rebellious teenage years with knowing winks. Her routines are clearly well worn, but that doesn’t make the one about how she came to New York a successful actress desperate to make it as a struggling waitress any less funny. At the end of each show, Tomlin famously answers audience questions, written on scraps of pink paper and dropped into a bucket ahead of time. She tackles a broad range of questions tonight, including one relating to her infamous on-set fight with I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell. Just for the record, she says that she and Russell are still friends, and that the foul-mouthed on-set exchange – immortalised now on YouTube – was just an unfortunate by-product of their intense creative process. Either way, on stage, Tomlin is worldly and effortlessly cool, and after an hour and a half in her presence, you almost feel like some of that has rubbed off.
ALASDAIR DUNCAN
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