Barry Humphries, the Australian comic actor, has been channeling the outrageously egomaniacal housewife Edna Everage ever since he was a college student. Now, after some sixty hugely successful years, Humphries is finally putting Dame Edna (as she took to calling herself) to rest.
In Dame Edna’s Glorious Goodbye, Humphries would have us believe that his alter ego is retiring for spiritual reasons. “It’s time I got in touch with my real self,” she confesses, adding in typical name-dropping fashion that she reached this conclusion while meditating in an Indian ashram along with the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere. Dame Edna also wanted everyone to know that she would be doing prostate outreach during her final years.
Humphries is so comfortable in Dame Edna’s skin–and in her glitzy, blinged-out costumes and wigs–that he doesn’t need much of a script to entertain an audience. Most of his new show depends on audience participation for its humor. Humphries singles out several people in the first row and begins insulting them a la Don Rickles. Their casual dress, old age and place of residence particularly tick him off, though he does soften up in the second act and invite two of them to join him on stage for a mock marriage which he brings off in hilarious fashion.
The rehearsed part of the show included a comic routine or two, plus a some production numbers in which Dame Edna sings off-key and totters around with a bevy of skimpily clad dancers. It is all very homey, down to earth, and raunchily funny.
If this, indeed, is Dame Edna’s final time on stage, the world will be a drabber place for all her millions of fans.
