One Dame Fine Act
Review by Andrew Fedosov

HEELLLOOO POSSUMS!!!!

Such a wonderful afternoon full of good feeling and warmth! Do you feel it? The Dame beams her smile and deigns to look up with a caustic brand of bejewelled backhanding. She hollers up to her loving but more common fans seated high up ("Les Miserables" is her affectionate term for them..."Mizzies for short...seated in the Mezzie") and any line about poverty or lower classes thereafter in her show gets a bespeckled and coiffed glance upwards. Below, Dame Edna hoovers the audience for "target face" people she has little chats with, and no one but the Dame makes such froth of the mundane.

In Dame Edna's Royal Tour the Dame exploits her improv talents, takes her signature political incorrectness and hugs you with it, right into her bosom, possum. With mere shtick and some seen-before-but-damn-you're-funny-anyway sight gags, the Dame takes the first 3 rows of her show, chooses her victims and buries them by listening to the minute details of their life.

"Did you go to the hairstylists today for the show?", she asks one with endearing curiousity, "No? I didn't think so darling," she recoils. No one can make you laugh that hard at merely being from Belleville ("I suppose someone has to be from Belleville. Might as well be you"), living in a 1 1/2 story home ("a half a story? Is it still being built?") with no particular adornments that distinguish said home ("you have only lived there for 20 years, dear...surely you haven't picked up on the home's more charming qualities yet, it does take time.")

The 80-year old lady the Dame pulled up on stage ("why you don't look a day under 90") was picked on for having a blue bedroom, a blue carpet and blue drapes. "Do you just feel around for where your bed might be or do you hurl yourself into the room and hope you land in it?" The Dame spares no one, though she likes gay men it seems, the only demo that doesn't get "demo'd." Pay back, perhaps. The Dame is no fool.

Drag is done. We cover unusual drag queens here at the Q, and the proportion of interesting drag performers compared to the total number of merely bitchy queens in the last echo of a one-note, vaudeville-like joke is pretty low. What could Dame Edna possibly do that hasn't already been done, not the least of which by her in her own television show?

PLENTY, possums! The Dame is among us to say one simple message - you can say anything you want as long as you are in a dress, a purple wig and wear a big smile on your face. And the older, straight crowd LOVE HER. They roared with applause, sang along about the Dame's window dressing son Kenny ("Toronto has sooo many...Men like Kenny" - wink wink), and wiggled the gladioli back to the Dame who tossed to them as the show ended.

I left the show wondering (and shaking with a case of the giggles) - could Dame Edna be here to save drag as a form of performance, or is she the last dowager queen of drag?

I suspect that either way she wouldn't care less, possums!

So... Who is this Barry Humphries...the manager who is never seen in the company of Dame Edna? Want to know more about this rakish gent? Read on...

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Frank Prendergast - Segment Producer

She’s bright. She’s funny. And she has the longest nose hairs I’ve ever seen on a woman.

Usually I wouldn’t say such a thing except this was Dame Edna. She insults everyone-even me.

During the news conference for her Royal Tour show at the Pantages Theatre she referred to me as the man with the “thinning hair”. I was honoured.

She then went on to take a jab at QT. Her show is full of this kind of humour. The disabled, lesbians, and minorities of all stripes are fair game.

Painful? Not at all.

Somehow this Dame delivers her barbs with such sweetness that you don’t know that you’re under attack.

I remember all the talk about using words like fag and queer so that you reclaim them. Us using them renders them meaningless.

Is this what she’s doing? Heck if I know, I’m still too busy laughing to try and figure it out.