Dame Edna: The Royal Tour

Possums, please know that Dame Edna Everage has checked into "the tucked-away Shooooobert Theatre" for a two-week stay that everyone can enjoy, even the "cheapskates" (better known as "Les Miserables," or Les mizzies) up in the second balcony. Edna, who began life forty years ago as a Melbourne working-class woman (in a gallery of impersonations by then unknown actor/writer Humphries) has worked her way up the social scale to her present status as self-anointed royalty, hobnobbing with the likes of the Queen Mother. Even after all this time, Edna is more hilarious than ever -- and more outrageous, thanks to her sequined dresses, purple hair, gaudy eyeglasses, dripping jewelry and barbed one-liners.

Dispensing with fixed routines, Humphries is so comfortable and assured as Edna that he can improvise most of his show, playing off the audience, insulting them in Don Rickles fashion, even bringing them on stage to enjoy a dinner from Harry's Bar ("something you'd never have gotten from Mamma Mia or Rent," she points out cattily). Backed up by a pianist (Wayne Barker) and two showgirls, Humphries is a punster and funster of the highest order, drawing laugh after laugh with his off-the-cuff one liners and jibes. Ever the snob, Edna is always concerned with the way people look, where they live and work. But such is her ego and vanity that, even after putting someone down, she gushes about "how wonderful it is that we're bonding, getting to know one another." She really is an awful person -- but Humphries satirizes Edna so successfully and skillfully, we can't get enough of her.