Shirley MacLaine to discuss stage, screen at Schermerhorn

Shirley MacLaine can do it all: sing, dance, act on stage and screen, and turn a double play. Before pursuing a career in show business, MacLaine was a slugging shortstop on her school baseball team in Arlington, Virginia. “I was basically an athlete all the way around,” says the 81-year-old star, who began dance lessons at the age of three, joking that she used to do plies in the infield.

On July 30, MacLaine will turn the Schermerhorn Symphony Center “into (her) living room” for “An Intimate Evening with Shirley MacLaine.” The program, hosted by author Ann Patchett (who describes herself as “the bridesmaid to Shirley MacLaine’s bride”), will feature a career retrospective followed by a no-holds-barred question and answer session with the audience. “The thing that is the most interesting to me, and the most fulfilling, is the live audience,” MacLaine, who began her career performing on the stage, says. “I love hearing what they’re thinking about, what’s on their minds and what their collective energy is.”

MacLaine, who starred in “Terms of Endearment” and “Steel Magnolias,” among many, many others, and was an unofficial mascot of the Rat Pack, is bluntly honest, and open to discuss anything during the show: “dancing, singing, movies, television, writing, traveling, lovers, politics, science and physics,” she elaborates, noting that many audience members are drawn toward the books she has written about her spiritual outlook. “I think it is so much fun to contemplate having lived before,” she says. “All of us have been different genders, different sexes, different cultures and probably (on) different planets.

“I think people are so upset about what’s going on in the world that they want some way out.”

MacLaine’s career has spanned six decades, and she’s still working: she is editing her new book, and her latest film, “Wild Oats,” is slated to come out in the fall. But good roles for a woman her age are hard to find, she says: “There aren’t that many…senior citizens are the most underserved but also the most loyal of movie audiences.”

She says she has no plans to slow down, but pauses, then laughs. “The more Meryl (Streep) keeps working, the quicker I’m going to think about retiring.”

If you go: Thursday, July 30, 7:30 p.m. at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, $29-79