{"id":10123,"date":"2013-10-18T16:41:20","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T22:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/?p=10123"},"modified":"2013-10-20T09:55:33","modified_gmt":"2013-10-20T15:55:33","slug":"rita-rudner-appear-on-gulf-coast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/rita-rudner-appear-on-gulf-coast\/","title":{"rendered":"Rita Rudner appears on Gulf Coast"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By ALAN SMASON, <em>Exclusive to the CCJN<\/em><\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 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 &#8220;Married with no Chilldren.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_10124\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10124\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10124 lazyload\" title=\"Rita_Rudner_edit\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-300x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"271\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-300x271.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-1024x928.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit.jpg 1152w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/271;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-10124\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10124\" title=\"Rita_Rudner_edit\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-300x271.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"271\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-300x271.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit-1024x928.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Rita_Rudner_edit.jpg 1152w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-10124\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rita Rudner appears tomorrow night in Bay St. Louis at the Hollywood Casino. (Photo courtesy Rita Rudner)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>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. &#8220;It was a midlife change,&#8221; she admitted in an exclusive CCJN phone interview.<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 &#8220;In Hollywood a good marriage is one that outlasts milk,&#8221; she quipped.<\/p>\n<p>Rudner has now been living and performing on the Las Vegas strip for more than a decade and it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It\u2019s lots and lots of fun,&#8221; she said of her professional life. &#8220;I\u2019m so happy I did it when I did it. I\u2019m a big believer in you can have it all, but just not at the same time.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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\u00a0 equally impressive stint at Harrah&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Even though she has concentrated more on her child-rearing, the husband-wife jokes are still a major part of her repertoire. &#8220;Martin knew what he was getting in when he signed on,&#8221; she pointed out. &#8220;It\u2019s like dating Taylor Swift. You marry a comedienne and you know they\u2019re going to talk about you. But, I do comment on my own inadequacies.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The couple has collaborated on many projects including the big screen comedy &#8220;Peter&#8217;s Friends,&#8221; directed and starring Kenneth Branaugh with stars Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. More recently they wrote two plays together.<\/p>\n<p>But more times than not Rudner is doing her own thing. She has starred in a PBS special &#8220;Rita Rudner: Live from Las Vegas&#8221; and launched her own daily syndicated TV show &#8220;Ask Rita&#8221; in 2003. She&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s not that she is afraid of being labeled a self-loathing Jew. &#8220;I don\u2019t want to leave people out,&#8221; she explained. &#8220;I&#8217;m a people pleaser. I want to have everybody understand everything.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s fabled &#8220;Mack and Mabel&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>With as many projects as she has it&#8217;s hard to understand where she gets all of her energy to pull it off. &#8220;It&#8217;s like what Tommy Smothers answered, when someone asked him how he did it,&#8221; she recalled. &#8220;&#8216;Smoke and mirrors.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><em>Rita Rudner performed last night in the Cypress Ballroom of the Hollywood Casino in Bay St. Louis<\/em>. <\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Rita%20Rudner%20appears%20on%20Gulf%20Coast\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[4039,4038,8790,8795,8788,4037],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10123"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10123"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10146,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10123\/revisions\/10146"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}