There may be no more potent antidote to our age of self-importance than Dame Edna Everage, the housewife and self-proclaimed megastar from Australia. A tastefully garish hybrid of Margaret Thatcher and Liberace, this fantastic comic apparition is ready to conquer Broadway after vanquishing much of the rest of the English-speaking world with her deliriously silly vaudeville act marrying bourgeois propriety and showbiz egotism.

There may be no more potent antidote to our age of self-importance than Dame Edna Everage, the housewife and self-proclaimed megastar from Australia. A tastefully garish hybrid of Margaret Thatcher (hair and ego) and Liberace (wardrobe and ego), this fantastic comic apparition is ready to conquer Broadway after vanquishing much of the rest of the English-speaking world with her deliriously silly vaudeville act marrying (and mocking) bourgeois propriety and showbiz egotism. Although some may be impervious to her iron-butterfly charms — some are impervious to humor, after all — word of mouth on this crowd-pleasing confection should be strong.

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Dame Edna is not, of course, a dame in any sense of the word. She sprang full-grown from the imagination of the Australian actor and artist Barry Humphries in the late 1950s, and subsequently commandeered his life. Edna extravaganzas have been fixtures on the West End for two decades, and she’s no less beloved in her homeland.

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Previous U.S. forays via television series have been abortive, and in truth, the dame was not at her best playing host to various film and TV personalities in her chatshow tryouts on Fox and NBC. Dame Edna is a wonderfully fragrant symbol of our celebrity-addled age, and her collaboration with even the gamest of authentic stars rather skews the satire.

In her first U.S. stage show, which played a long run in the fall in San Francisco, Dame Edna is more happily showcased, upholstered in Stephen Adnitt’s glitzily ludicrous gowns and Kenneth Foy’s plush set, which could comfortably accommodate either a 1964 Barbie doll or “The Lawrence Welk Show.” Although she is assisted by a pianist and two cheesy dancers, Dame Edna alone is the star now, and we the observers are the supporting players.

There is a certain amount of danger involved in an audience with Dame Edna. For in an act of refreshing spiritual generosity — so rare in these days of egotistic and insulated performers, as she doesn’t fail to point out — the star takes a benevolent interest in her fans, or “possums.”

Much of this two hours and more of stage entertainment is a savagely funny give and take across the footlights, as Dame Edna queries various audience members about their lives, lifestyles, eating habits and decorating tastes.

In the guise of taking such sympathetic interest in the doings of lesser mortals, and in the hilariously authentic clucking tones of a mild-mannered matron, the Dame in fact showers the audience with insults and upbraidings, all meant “in a nurturing way,” she warmly admonishes us.

Told that one Romey has spent much money furnishing her home, she assures us, “It’s all right. Romey has saved a lot of money on clothes.”

But Dame Edna has her own troubles to share with her shrink, Dr. Schadenfreude. There’s her mysteriously still-unmarried son Kenny, now living in Chelsea after a checkered career as a window dresser and dress designer (the dame sings an homage to Gotham whose chorus runs, “I never thought that I would meet so many … friends of Kenny”); her recalcitrant mother, now happily resting in a “maximum security twilight home”; and her daughter Valmai, of Flatbush, distressingly co-habitating with a “retired Czech tennis player” of the same sex.

Put simply, Dame Edna is hypocrisy personified — the caring friend who couldn’t care less, the self-centered celebrity who makes a career of humility and selflessness, the nice middle-class hausfrau with the instincts of a shark.

Humphries’ creation makes us laugh because she is a larger-than-life reflection of universal human foibles. Her smug superiority is only an exaggeration of our own uneasy sense of class-consciousness (one factor behind her instant popularity in England). She boasts the same self-satisfactions and self-delusions we do, only hers are writ in rhinestones.

Analysis aside, she is also simply and strangely a hoot, never less than during the show’s finale, when she showers the audience not with barbs but bulbs. Flinging gladioli, her signature flower, into the audience, and exhorting the possums to rise, she turns the Booth Theater into something out of Lewis Carroll, as previously sober-looking adults wave flowers to and fro and join in a silly sing-along.

The effect is a little disorienting and entirely appropriate. For with Dame Edna, Humphries slyly mocks the silliness of celebrity worship even as his creation casts the kind of spell only a megastar can.

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Dame Edna: The Royal Tour

Booth Theater, New York; 790 seats; $60 top

  • Production: A Leonard Soloway, Chase Mishkin, Steven M. Levy and Jonathan Reinis presentation of a solo show in two acts devised and written by Barry Humphries, with additional material by Ian Davidson.
  • Crew: Set, Kenneth Foy; costumes, Stephen Adnitt; lighting, Jason Kantrowitz; sound, Peter Fitzgerald; production stage manager, James W. Gibbs. Opened Oct. 17, 1999. Reviewed Oct. 13. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.
  • Cast: With: Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries), Andrew Ross, Roxane Barlow, Tamlyn Brooke Shusterman.

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