Rita Moreno is 88 but has never been busier, with the Tuesday return of her sitcom, "One Day at a Time," and the upcoming release of a "West Side Story" remake, which she acted in and co-produced.
"One Day," a sitcom about a Latinx family, was canceled by Netflix but picked up by Pop, home of "Schitt's Creek," after fans launched a campaign to bring it back. Moreno has been in tons of television shows, including semiregular appearances on "Bless This Mess" (7:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Ch. 5). But she's especially thrilled about "One Day," in which she plays the matriarch of a clan that grapples with real-life challenges.
At a fan event around the time the pickup was announced last summer, she discovered that others also are thrilled. To a deafening degree.
"The whole cast met with fans, about 200 people in that room with us, and I've never done this before because I feel it's insulting to people, but they were cheering so loud that I had to put my fingers in my ears. They were just screaming with happiness," said Moreno by phone in November, days before she had to cancel a concert appearance at the Ordway Center because of laryngitis.
She thinks the TV show (8:30 p.m. Tuesdays, Pop) has struck a chord for a variety of reasons: its representation of Latinx characters and of multiple generations of a family, as well as its recognition that laughter helps us through difficult times.
"It's funny and very moving," said Moreno. "It's easy to switch from comedy to something sad and not do it well, and that's what you usually see when shows attempt to do that. It's unskillful and clumsy. We are so good at it — and, by the way, when I say 'we,' I'm really speaking of [producer] Norman Lear and the writers. It's so hard to do it well, but they do."
Moreno probably is best known as one of the first to achieve the Emmy/Grammy/Oscar/Tony Award quadruple crown, an honor she racked up before the term EGOT was coined in 1984. The final bauble in Moreno's EGOT was the Emmy, which she won in both 1977 and 1978 for guest appearances on, respectively, "The Muppets" and James Garner's detective show, "The Rockford Files," a plum part she was offered at a time when there weren't a lot of plum parts coming to her.
"Jim was such a dear and a very good friend of mine," Moreno said. "We were on the same trip together, to witness the March on Washington when Martin Luther King spoke. We were right there. Jimmy was terrified, very worried about what it would do to his career. But what makes him so special is that he attended the event nonetheless. Because, at that time, it really could have had a bad impact."
