PARTY LINE: Lily Tomlin brings her famous characters like telephone operator Ernestine to Montalvo Saturday.

Anyone who saw the YouTube videos of Lily Tomlin and director David O. Russell melting down on the set of I Heart Huckabees can understand why Tomlin would prefer to work onstage—or maybe even give up on Hollywood completely. But it didn't take a demanding film auteur to make the multiple-Tony-Award-winning comedian appreciate live performance. "I like the stage best of all, and that's what I would do if I could do nothing else," Tomlin told me last year. "I guess I'll do it till I drop." Though she's never really stopped touring in a career that spans more than three decades, Tomlin's most recent shows have been a comeback—not for her, but for many of the characters she's created over the years. "An Evening of Classic Lily Tomlin" is not a stage show like her Broadway hit The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, but a retrospective of multiple personalities. "It's a compilation of characters I've done for the last 30 years. It's pretty informal," she says. "I fancy that some of them are classic." History is on her side; her creations have had a way of winding their way into the public consciousness—or just outright exploding overnight. That was pretty much the case with the two characters that launched her career: the 5-year-old Edith Ann, and the abrasive telephone operator Ernestine. After Tomlin joined the groundbreaking sketch comedy show Laugh-In in 1969, Ernestine in particular practically defined the kind of stardom that would later become a template for comedians on Saturday Night Live: an oddball character with one or more quotable catchphrases—in Ernestine's case, lines like "Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?" and "One ringy dingy, two ringy dingy"—who becomes the talk of workplace watercoolers everywhere. To this day, Tomlin doesn't really know what hit her. "How could I get so lucky with that character?" she wonders. "She really is one of those serendipitous things, you don't know how they happen."

Saturday, 8pm

Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga

$40–$125