I Love You, You're Perfect,
Now Change

A hilarious musical review with a cast of 4 performing 18 different vignettes. The staging is minimal but clever, and the dialog and songs well written. It follows the entire mating ritual from first date to marriage (the Bridesmaid song is spot on) through having kids, losing your spouse and finding a new romance at their funeral. I saw this off-Broadway in 1998 and would see it again in a shot!

Pump Boys and Dinettes

Three guys own and work the gas station and the two Cupp sisters the own diner across the way. This is a pop and country musical about a day in their lives. The staging is wonderful; they even involve the audience in the performance, dragging at least one viewer onto the stage to have their finger nails done by the "sister" who wants to attend beauty school. Guess who got his nails painted when he last saw the play?

A Day in Hollywood
A Night in the Ukraine

The first act is a musical review of famous Hollywood film songs and songs about Hollywood in the 30's. It's fun and lively.

In the second act, the actors become Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Gummo, Margaret Dumont, etc., and put on entire Marx Brothers musical play with superb songs and very funny dialog.

A Night With

OK, Possums. If you don't know Dame Edna, you should. She is the Australian housewife who burst on the scene in 1956, was given her Dame-hood sometime back in the 1980's (but we're not sure who did that), is the toast of at least three continents, has TV programmes and specials, tells it like she sees it (even if that means being cruel to be kind to those she talks to and about), and never looks back.

Actually, Dame Edna is the alter ego of Barry Humphries, a very talented man with boundless energy and the abilit to grasp an audience, hold them, carress them, and make their sides hurt and their heads ache.

Patty gave me 2 tickets for my Birthday this year (2003) to see his/her one woman/man show in San Francisco.

Brilliant!

And that doesn't half cover it.

For over 2 hours, Dame Edna interacts with the audience. She sings a couple of tunes and has about 10 minutes of material that seem to stay there from show to show. But the genius is in the audience work. It takes a brilliant mind to be able to know who you can get the best out of (including the two women she dragged onstage during Act 2 and made eat an Italian lunch -- with wine -- while talking to them about how sick the smell of 20 large dogs locked up in her daughter's mobile home in Milpitas made her -- complete with gagging fits.

She talks about her now-dead husband and his years of suffereing from a prostate murmer. Of her son, Kenny, and his life as a fashion designer and flower arranger (he designs her fabulous frocks, you know) and her daughter and her short-haired, stocky, female "roommate."

Unless you have been to a standup performance by someone like Charlie Adler (the voice of Roger Rabbit) and have seen someone work the audience, remembering little details about them and continuing to work it into their act. building a new act minute by minute, one that can never be repeated... ever... then you may have trouble picturing all this. But it is marvelous and genius better than almost anything you could ever hope to see on stage.

And if you have seen any of the Dame Edna temevision programmes, you are only seeing about 15% of what she is capable of.

As nearly as I can figure it, Humphries must be in his very late 60's or early 70's, yet he has the energy of a 20 year old. And you never see a man dressed in drag. You see and experience Dame Edna. If you get the chance when he is touring, GO!!!