‘I’M hands on, I’m in your face, I’m here,” barks Dame Edna Everage, Australia’s “First Lady,” while doing little dance steps in a silver dress that might kindly be described as geriatric flapper. Besides having the best gams on Broadway since Dietrich, Edna is, she claims, “probably the most popular and gifted woman in the world today.” She’ll get no quarrel from me. Her act, “Dame Edna, The Royal Tour: The Show That Listens,” is by far the funniest and cleverest show in town.
Edna’s creator (and, according to the program, larcenous manager) Barry Humphries is a very sharp, quick-witted, lynx-eyed satirist who came out of Australian comedy in the 1950s and London theater in the 1960s – surroundings roughly equivalent to the Chicago comedy scene that over here produced Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In his Everage persona, created in 1956, Humphries unites, with something like genius, two traditions: the acid, liberal, small-club satire of the 1950s and the broad, conservative humor of the old music hall drag act.
Dame Edna’s evening is not heavy on plot (which, she points out, makes it ideal for befuddled seniors). She sings a few funny songs in her eccentric chirp; she brings us up to date on her personal life; she interacts with the audience. Edna is always on top of the latest fashions: she recently discovered, for example, that she was abused (her stepmom made her dry the dishes) and that she is Jewish (and, in fact, related to Madeleine Albright).
A widow for a decade, she still mourns Norm’s loss to prostate murmur; this part of the act could be called “The Prostate Monologues” – a lively antidote to “The Vagina Monologues.” She is in New York partly to see her children: Kenny’s a designer who lives in Chelsea; Valmai raises pit bulls in Flushing. Edna’s been well-briefed, by the way, perhaps by contributor Ian Davidson, on nasty New York minutiae.
But the narrative of Edna’s life, while absorbing, is largely an excuse to involve the hapless spectators in her world. In general, she enjoys rubbing in the differences between “les miserables” in the balcony and the posh orchestra. In particular, Edna weaves, each evening, elaborate scenarios implicating audience members: the couple who look starved, the woman who looks like she made her own clothes, the senile guy, the woman who left a babysitter at home, the man caught reading his program. Edna remembers every name and toys with them during the show.
“The Royal Tour” is a complexly ironic show that manages to parody both celebrity (there’s a not wholly successful bit about the Royal Family and a glorious final tribute to “Edna Power” that involves mass use of gladioli) and ordinariness. It’s a tricky balancing act, especially when you’re wearing a beaded red gown, like Edna at the end. Has satire ever been so funny since “Beyond the Fringe”?
At the Booth (which Edna persists in miscalling the Oswald and the Squeaky Fromme), 222 W. 45 St.; (212) 239-6260.