Rita Rudner appears on Gulf Coast
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
Rita Rudner, a petite and comely comedienne has made her mark in stand-up comedy for most of the past three decades as a sharp-dressing woman with oodles of class and thousands of funny lines. A lady of fashion, she had been married with no children for so long that it became part of her act. She even had an HBO TV show titled “Married with no Chilldren.”
Rita Rudner appears tomorrow night in Bay St. Louis at the Hollywood Casino. (Photo courtesy Rita Rudner)
Then the unthinkable happened. She and her husband elected to adopt their daughter Molly. Beverly Hills was no longer the proper place to raise a child and, in a strange reversal for most people in the entertainment industry, they sold their house, left Hollywood and headed for Las Vegas. “It was a midlife change,” she admitted in an exclusive CCJN phone interview.
She and her British screenwriter husband, Martin Bergman, had decided the Los Angeles scene was not what they wanted as a married couple as well. “In Hollywood a good marriage is one that outlasts milk,” she quipped.
Rudner has now been living and performing on the Las Vegas strip for more than a decade and it’s a lifestyle with which she agrees. She is able to bring her now 12-year-old daughter to school, take care of the household duties of typical mothers and wives, yet works the nightclub scene at night.
“It’s lots and lots of fun,” she said of her professional life. “I’m so happy I did it when I did it. I’m a big believer in you can have it all, but just not at the same time.”
Voted the top female comedienne on the Strip for eight years in a row, Rudner enjoys impressive records as an entertainer. She had a six-year run at New York, New York Casino that generated over a million ticket sales, then followed that with an equally impressive stint at Harrah’s Las Vegas and now appears in an even larger space at the Venetian Hotel. Her sales have generated gates of over $50 million to date.
Occasionally, she gets to travel on a regular basis to other casinos across the country. Rudner winged her way to nearby Bay St. Louis to perform last night, October 19, at the Hollywood Casino.
Even though she has concentrated more on her child-rearing, the husband-wife jokes are still a major part of her repertoire. “Martin knew what he was getting in when he signed on,” she pointed out. “It’s like dating Taylor Swift. You marry a comedienne and you know they’re going to talk about you. But, I do comment on my own inadequacies.”
The couple has collaborated on many projects including the big screen comedy “Peter’s Friends,” directed and starring Kenneth Branaugh with stars Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. More recently they wrote two plays together.
But more times than not Rudner is doing her own thing. She has starred in a PBS special “Rita Rudner: Live from Las Vegas” and launched her own daily syndicated TV show “Ask Rita” in 2003. She’s also written a number of comedy books and was credited as a writer for the 2001-2003 Academy Awards along with comedians Steve Martin and Whoopi Goldberg.
Even though Rudner is not religiously observant (her husband is not Jewish), she makes a practice out of not telling Jewish jokes at non-Jewish affairs. It’s not that she is afraid of being labeled a self-loathing Jew. “I don’t want to leave people out,” she explained. “I’m a people pleaser. I want to have everybody understand everything.”
With someone so talented, it may surprise some to know Rudner started out on the Great White Way not as a stand-up comedienne, but standing and dancing on her feet. She was a member of several successful Broadway ensembles including Jerry Herman’s fabled “Mack and Mabel” starring Bernadette Peters and the late Robert Preston. Although she was a member of the chorus, she does recall meeting Herman and the late, great Gower Champion.
With as many projects as she has it’s hard to understand where she gets all of her energy to pull it off. “It’s like what Tommy Smothers answered, when someone asked him how he did it,” she recalled. “‘Smoke and mirrors.'”
Rita Rudner performed last night in the Cypress Ballroom of the Hollywood Casino in Bay St. Louis.
