By MIKE WEATHERFORD LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
July 17, 2016 - 5:46 pm
“You can’t buy laughter. And you can’t make it up,” says Cindy Williams, who knows a little about comic timing. Actually, 159 half-hours of “Laverne & Shirley” worth.
So it’s high praise to the local cast of “Menopause The Musical” when their new guest star declares: “These girls have rhythm. They know how to set things up and then, boom!”
“There’s nothing more wonderful than that godly talent of being able to make an audience laugh. And this show has it. This cast has it.”
Williams is doing a two-month stretch in the slapstick, female-bonding musical at Harrah’s Las Vegas. It’s usually performed with four characters, and the 68-year-old Williams came to town last year to learn the show with the Las Vegas cast, and then go into a Florida production as one of the quartet.
Instead, “I got whatever they call it — ‘the Las Vegas Creeping Crud’ — and strep throat.” So producers Alan and Kathi Glist told her, “We’ll find things to do for you in the show.” As in Florida, the Harrah’s edition she’s in through Aug. 28 creates a fifth character who pops up now and then as what Williams terms “a sympathizer.”
“Everyone laughs together and there’s just something so wonderful,” she says. “If only America could be that all the time.”
Once, it came closer. In the late ’70s, there were only three commercial networks and “Laverne & Shirley” often topped the ratings in the first three seasons following its 1976 debut.
With co-star Penny Marshall and an ensemble cast including Michael McKean, “the cast would work during rehearsal to make it laugh-out-loud funny. We’d try and try and try,” she recalls.
“We’d change up attitudes, our physicality. We just wanted to hone it into something that was laugh-out-loud funny. During rehearsal, if we laughed at it, that was our litmus paper. We were all of us an audience. If it made us laugh, it was going to translate to the audience and make them laugh.”
The show ran eight seasons and Williams was in all but the last 20 episodes; a dispute with the producers stemming from her pregnancy led to her abrupt departure.
“After a while you go, ‘Well, we’ve done everything we can, except I haven’t taken a bite out of your hair,’” she says. And so they did that too, rigging Williams up with “this little piece of wig in the back.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that since,” she adds. “But those were the lengths we’d go to to get a laugh, and we got a huge laugh out of that.”
Williams came to the series after co-starring in one of the biggest movie hits of the ’70s, “American Graffiti.” It was something of a pop-culture loop since “Graffiti” inspired “Happy Days,” and “Laverne & Shirley” was a “Happy Days” spinoff.
She remembers someone asking if she worried the show would typecast her. “I’m a character actress. I can play anything,” she replied.
But of course, “it happened.” And she has no complaints. “It became a blessing. A true blessing. From soup to nuts, a blessing.”
“The Drowsy Chaperone” got her to Broadway in 2007, but a stagehands strike curtailed her run after three weeks. Now she ventures out from her home near Palm Desert, California, to mostly perform regional theater titles such as “Always Patsy Cline.” Williams and “Shirley” co-star Eddie Mekka were part of a “Grease” cast at the MGM Grand in 2000, and just completed a dinner-theater comedy called “Beau Jest” in Kansas City.
“I love Las Vegas. It’s one of the few places on Earth that goes faster than me,” she says. “It actually calms me down.”
Last year brought the publication of her memoir, “Shirley, I Jest! A Storied Life.” The candid book fills in the details on a less-than idyllic childhood where TV played a prescient role.
“As a child I was like a latchkey kid, so television was my baby sitter. ‘My Little Margie’ and Roy Rogers and all those wonderful characters. I could live at their house. I was safe and sound and everybody was happy and mirthful.
“It just imbued me with a sense of humor. My father had a great sense of humor, but he was also an alcoholic,” she says. Fifties TV “just gave me a view of the world that wasn’t the world I was living in.”
And now? Full circle. “People will come up to me and they’ll say, ‘Laverne and Shirley’ got me through my childhood.’ I can’t even. … It’s an honor, a privilege, a blessing that you made some kid on a couch listening to his parents fight laugh.”
