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The grande dame
Ready to serve up her zany stew of wit and wackiness, Dame Edna swirls into town for some wild nights and an unexpected lunch.
By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 12, 2002
[Publicity photo]
Dame Edna’s persona was born in a sketch for a 1955 revue.
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Dame Edna seemed a bit annoyed. It was news to her that she was scheduled to give a lunchtime performance on Wednesday as part of next week's engagement of A Night With Dame Edna at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.
"They're billing it as lunch with Dame Edna," I said during a phone interview.
"Are they? Well, I better investigate this," she said. "You know what publicists always say: 'Oh, it's too late to pull out of that one!' The idea of actually sitting there and having lunch with people in Tampa is a sort of a mixed blessing for me. Do they give a time for it?"
I told her it was Wednesday at noon, the day after opening night, not exactly a time to please most performers.
"Hmmm, Wednesday at noon, lunch with Edna," she mused. "Where is this lunch?"
"It's in the performance hall."
"Is it meant to be a show?"
"Yes, but I believe it's a bit shorter than the nighttime show."
"Oh, it will be," she said with a huff, then turned philosophical. "Well, I have learned to go with the flow. Luckily, I've never taken my job very seriously. I see myself as an inspired amateur."
Dame Edna was speaking from Miami, where she started a seven-city tour last week. The tour is "a coda," she said, to her Tony Award-winning Broadway show and national tour in 2000-01 that included a stop at Ruth Eckerd Hall.
"I've introduced some new elements. What happens with my shows is that I keep adding things. It's like a big pot of stew on a stove that begins with something and you keep adding and adding and adding and taking away and taking away. In the end, it looks the same and tastes completely different."
Edna will no doubt talk about her dysfunctional family, including her "sensible" son, Bruce. "He's a feng shui consultant," she said. "I've set him up in the business."
"What's feng shui?" I asked.
"Feng shui is actually giving furniture acupuncture, I think. It's putting mirrors up where normally you wouldn't, moving things around. It's charging people to rearrange their furniture in order that it brings them good luck. It's very, very Oriental."
Mainly, though, Edna will roast the audience with her uncanny mix of affection and stinging wit. She plucks people out of the crowd and interrogates them about things like the interior decoration of their houses, the finer details of which they invariably can't recall.
She orders Italian takeout for a couple and brings them up onstage to dine. She calls somebody's babysitter from a phone. She makes inane, patently insincere remarks.
Dame Edna is the creation of the Australian actor Barry Humphries, who had the inspired idea that a housewife from the Melbourne suburbs turned megastar, a lady of a certain age in a mauve wig who is given to glittery gowns, precariously high heels and absurdly grand airs, could be a wonderful comic vehicle.
Humphries is listed in the credits as deviser and writer of the show but never acknowledges that he is, in fact, the Dame in drag. This resolute separation of character and actor -- interviews are given by either Edna or Humphries -- is all part of the elaborate conceit that has gone into the creation of the role, which began as a sketch in a revue by an Australian touring troupe in 1955.
The whole story is brilliantly told in New Yorker theater critic John Lahr's Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilization. But Edna has mixed feelings about the 1992 book that gave her intellectual cachet.
"Well, it contained the old fictions about Mr. Humphries and me being the same person. He perpetuated that myth," she said.
Edna casts Humphries, who has played such roles as Fagin in Oliver! and Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as a disreputable manager who latched onto her early in her career after she won Australia's Lovely Mother Contest.
"Barry Humphries, who was a longhaired, rather arty type of a person, approached me and offered me a management contract, which I foolishly signed," she said. "It turned out to be legal and binding, and since that day, he's had his hand in the till -- up to the armpits!
"You see, the tragedy of some of these managers is that they're eclipsed by the star, and their lives are spent revenging themselves against the artist, and they can only do it financially. Oh, the double-dipping, the fleecing that has gone on."
Though Dame Edna is a man dressed up as a woman, the show is not really a drag act; it's more theatrical than mere impersonations of gay icons like Judy Garland or Bette Davis. Humphries, 68, is married to Lizzie Spender, daughter of renowned English poet Stephen Spender, and has four children.
It's no coincidence that Dame Edna winds up her show by passing out gladioli, beautiful but lethal-looking flowers whose chief characteristics are swordlike leaves and spiky blossoms.
"It is a sort of a javelin -- a floral javelin," she said. "It's been said I use them a little aggressively. I see them as a symbol, of optimism, of energy. They're not a subtle flower, really. There are not many poems written about them."
"I don't think there any poems about them," I said.
"Oh, I've written many poems about them," she said, offering a couplet on her trademark flower:
There's no vision more holy
Than massed gladioli.
PREVIEW: A Night with Dame Edna opens Tuesday and runs through Sept. 22 in Morsani Hall of Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $22.50-$53.50 except for the abbreviated lunchtime performance at noon Wednesday when they are $9.50-$33.50. Box lunches will be $7. (813) 229-7827 or toll-free 1-800-955-1045 or www.tbpac.org
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