Bornstein: Audience eats up Edna

Comic helps people laugh at themselves

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Published January 20, 2006 at midnight

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Eh.

Ha.

Huh.

And repeat.

Dame Edna returned to Denver Tuesday, leaving much of the audience in hysterics, but me in a kind of removed, uninspired state.

"That's a witty line," my brain thought.

My gut did nothing.

Dame Edna Everage, the alter ego of comedian Barry Humphries, is 250 pounds of glitter, feathers and insults. Like a loopy older star - think Liza Minnelli, or even Carol Channing - she is completely insulated from life's tedious realities.

Instead, she descends to the stage on a pair of giant, bejeweled glasses, bathed in a battle between her own self-absorption and the audience's adoration of her. Even her preshow announcement suggests where she stands on the food chain: "At the moment, your welfare and security is pretty low on my list of priorities."

And the audience eats it up, as she clomps around the stage, singling out those in the first few rows for special attention. She tears apart one woman, to everyone's amusement, comforting her at the end by saying, "You have the gift of insignificance."

Edna - that is, Humphries - has an impressive gift for speedy extemporaneity, rolling with audience responses. She tells one woman her clothes look "affordable," and when another says her last trip was to Florida, Edna responds, "You're nearly as well-traveled as the President of the United States."

There are off-color jokes aplenty, about genitals, sex and in one that goes too far, Spanish-speaking hotel maids. Particularly funny are bits when she pulls up a young married couple to give them counseling, and when she pulls five audience members onstage to play her family - their enthusiastic participation made for everyone's delight.

Between these moments, Edna speaks in her distinctively screechy voice, the kind that could clear a stadium with a whisper, and sings and dances alongside two former Rockettes.

Her greatest stiletto is reserved for mocking our own worship of celebrity, the "we're not worthy" stance of fandom and our willingness to be destroyed by strangers. "I meant that in a Dr. Phil way," she soothes after one of her jabs.

But it's a decidedly middlebrow humor, with nothing particularly edgy or requiring much thought from the audience. Rather, Edna provides an opportunity for the audience to laugh at itself, via her.

Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!

• Grade: B-

• When and where: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through Jan. 29 in the Buell Theatre of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, Speer Boulevard and Arapahoe Street

• Cost: $25 to $60

• Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes

• Information: 303-893-4100

Lisa Bornstein is the theater critic. bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5101

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