EDDIE IZZARD
At the City Center, West 55th Street between Sixth and Seventhth Avenues. Call (212) 581-1212. Through Oct. 11.
EDDIE Izzard is unique.
But what makes him unique is not his wardrobe, although he wears a dress onstage. He’s a straight transvestite (or at least as unbent as a transvestite can get).
And it’s not his androgyny, which is as carefully applied as his mascara, making him look something like a cross between Madonna and David Bowie.
What is special about the man is his comic genius. His popularity is such that he can fill the vast City Center for a week (I’m told 97 percent attendance at last count) without any advertising or even much publicity.
When he first wowed New York five or six years ago in the relatively tiny performing space of P.S. 122, he used to perform sitting down. Now he stands up and moves around the stage with the dynamo energy of a nervous prizefighter fearing the worst.
What remains the same since his debut here is his fantastic, commanding sense of the casual.
He has virtually made the actor’s aside into an art form, and developed a remarkable, unending stream of consciousness that would make James Joyce proud and perhaps Virginia Woolf afraid.
He never stops. He takes a comic idea and teases it, nuzzles it and chews on it like a playful puppy with a bone.
His onstage character persona – English-superior, mocking, remote, even alienated – has not much to do with his comedy, which just pours out as a cascade of intensely relevant chatter.
He whirls comic concepts in the air like balloons – Greek myths, transvestite superheroes, Neanderthal man versus Homo sapiens, dentists, Seeing-Eye dogs, greyhounds, fox-hunting, uncontrollable horses – and each balloon glitters iridescently in the hot air of allusive verbiage.
He’s irreverent, he’s dirty, he’s nonconformist, he’s wicked, he’s riotously funny.
If you get the chance to pick up a ticket to see him, grab it. And if you can’t, a DVD of this six-month world tour will be available. Grab that.