NewYork 6-21-22 [Video link below]
Mimi Hines’ enduring career as a singer and a comedienne started on August 28, 1958 when she and her partner, Phil Ford, appeared on The Tonight Show for the first time. Mimi sang “Till There Was You”, Jack Paar cried and Ford and Hines were in instant demand, frequently appearing on that show and many others. After headlining in all the top nightclubs and showrooms in the country, Mimi parlayed her career by replacing Barbra Streisand on Broadway in Funny Girl, running this star vehicle for 18 months on her own star power. Following Funny Girl, Mimi starred in national touring companies of I Do! I Do! and Prisoner of Second Avenue as well as star packages of Anything Goes, Never Too Late, Pajama Game, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, No, No, Nanette, Sugar, and many others. During this period, Mimi also recorded several very successful albums (recently released on compact disc by Harbinger Records) and appeared often on televisio
Mimi continues to headline in nightclubs and concert halls throughout the world, most recently at Feinstein’s at the Regency. She appeared with the Los Angeles Pops Orchestra and starred in national tours of Sugar Babies and Nite Club Confidential and, along with such peers as Rosemary Clooney and Eydie Gorme, on a recorded salute to Johnny Mercer titled Mostly Mercer. She then toured the world for a year in the title role of Hello Dolly!, starred in productions of A Majority of One and Can Can in Florida, and in revues featuring the songs of Alan and Marilyn Bergman titled How Do You Keep the Music Playing in Los Angeles and the songs of Rodgers and Hart titled This Funny World at the Kennedy Center in Washington and the songs of Jerry Herman, with Mr. Herman himself, at The Schoenberg Theatre in Los Angeles.
Mimi appeared as Mrs. Latimer on Frasier and returned to Broadway in the Tommy Tune production of Grease, in which she kept the cast in line as the strict but loveable schoolteacher, Miss Lynch. She also co-starred in the off-Broadway revival of Kander & Ebb’s 70 Girls 70, with Jane Powell, Charlotte Rae and Helen Gallagher, was a guest in the final week of The Rosie O’Donnell Show and stopped the show nightly in two productions for L.A.’s Reprise, as Letitia Primrose in On The Twentieth Century and as Pippin’s wise Grandmother, Berthe, in Pippin (which role she recreated at 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle). Recently, she co-starred as Sister Mary Amnesia in the National Tour of the 20th Anniversary production of Nunsense, along with Kaye Ballard, Georgia Engel, Lee Meriwether and Darlene Love and starred in And Then She Wrote at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Springs with Peter Marshall and Christine Andreas. Most recently, she starred in The Full Monty at the Maltz Theatre in Jupiter, FL and the City Center Encores production of Follies, causing one critic to comment that “she rips into ‘Broadway Baby’ with comic ferocity resembling that of a lion at dinnertime, building a bridge between the musical theatre lost and the musical theatre yet to come” and another critic to call her “the living embodiment of show business”. Mimi, who was born in Vancouver, currently resides in Las Vegas when she is not on tour.