[The occasion of Lily Tomlin's Broadway début with "Appearing Nitely"] is a personal triumph on a scale not unlike that of, say, Alexander sweeping through the Valley of Swat. Miss Tomlin is alone onstage for two hours or more, and her props consist only of a couple of stools and a few snippets of canned sound, but she is at once so likable and so tireless in her attack that the evening never wears thin. Sometimes she is content to act as a sort of latter-day Will Rogers without a lasso, commenting in her own voice, in a series of laconic one-liners, on the fuzzy thinking and domestic misadventures of contemporary life. More often she plunges at random into her seemingly inexhaustible repertory of impersonations…. These impersonations are always very funny and often said; Miss Tomlin takes a compassionate view of her fellow-creatures, and she must be constantly on guard against letting compassion falter downward into sentimentality.