Sunday, October 12, 2003

By Anna Rosenstein

The best of Britain seem to be making their way to Pittsburgh of late. Dame Edna (Australian by way of London) is here right now, and there's the highly anticipated visit by Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to come. But before that, Eddie Izzard breezes in Tuesday for two nights with "SEXIE," his latest one-man show.

	Eddie Izzard's "SEXIE" Where: Presented by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust at the Byham Theater, Downtown. When: 8 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday. Tickets: $40 and $50; www.pgharts.org or 412-456-6666.

Izzard is the English comic phenomenon who sells out stadiums seating as many as 14,000 in his own country. This is his biggest tour of the United States yet, and many fans are seeing him live for the first time, having only caught his act on video or HBO. His 1999 special, "Dress to Kill," won Izzard two Emmy awards for writing and performance.

Besides stand-up, Izzard's done films such as "Shadow of the Vampire" and "The Cat's Meow." On stage, he starred in the world premiere of David Mamet's "The Cryptogram" and, most recently, on Broadway in Peter Nichols' "A Day in the Death of Joe Egg," for which he received a Tony nomination for best actor.

How did Pittsburgh get so lucky? Izzard says the beautiful thing about his show is that it can be performed anywhere. Even if the place is a bit out of the way, people will travel to see him.

Not that Pittsburgh's out of the way. In fact, Izzard, from his hotel in Minneapolis, says he's heard we're undergoing a kind of "funky renaissance." And that's funky in the British sense of hip and cool, not the American sense of "smells bad." Ahh, but it means both here.

"Now that's very weird to have it mean 'not an interesting smell' and also 'groovy and sexy,' " says Izzard, sounding pleased to observe yet another oddity.

Izzard loves to play with words and language. In France, he performs in French and can do a whole riff on how words translate from one language to another. Ideas tend to flow seemingly free-form so that one idea leads to another that's more bizarre than the last. The world and all its creatures and creations are fair game. In "Dress to Kill," Izzard prompts the audience to acknowledge the sheer bizarreness of bees. "Bees make honey!" he exclaims. "Do earwigs make chutney? Do spiders make gravy?"

When he switches gears, he's as likely to talk about the Trojan horse as the Queen of England or Darth Vader or hopscotch. He cites influences such as Monty Python, Richard Pryor and Billy Connelly and calls his comedy "surreal, twisted ... crap," with an expletive providing the missing adjective.

Now that's "crap" in the good British sense and not in the American sense of "smells bad." OK, that's not true, but Izzard's off-the-cuff description shouldn't conceal how smart his comedy is. He loves history and geography and even in a brief phone conversation, he mixes in information about early British history and the Jewish advertising firm that had to overcome anti-German sentiment to market the Volkswagen Beetle.

"I like putting together images that are quite skewed, but I also like to try to have some truth or some point or some humanity behind it," he explains.

When Izzard begins a tour, he doesn't embark with script in hand. He develops the show on the road, playing out-of-the- way places and small venues and just gathering ideas -- "a work-in-progress" tour, he calls it.

"I work from the outside in. I do a lot of preparation on how things look." For this tour, even the title came before there was a show to name. "I could have called the show 'Elbow' but that's less sexy than calling it 'SEXIE.'"

Izzard leaves the odd spelling up to the imagination, but there's no doubt that, from the outside in, anyway, "SEXIE" feels sexy. The press photos show Izzard decked out in black, wearing leather or silk, fishnets and heels. Izzard will sometimes talk in his shows about being a transvestite, "an executive transvestite," he jokes, letting everyone work out that savvy and sophistication aren't outside the transgender realm. It's who he is but it's not what his shows are about.

In a way, all of Izzard's shows are sexy. They're fast and physical and intellectually stimulating. Though the venues he performs in now are huge, even on video you can sense the intimacy. His shows, he says, are like a chat in a pub. He feels like he's talking to one person. "It's like a one-sided conversation for two hours where no one else gets a word in edgewise."

That connection to the audience is important to Izzard. He likes that he can make people from all over laugh at the same things. "I'd like to do a perfect universal show." Even though he always improvises, Izzard says he wishes he could bring the same show one night to Iceland, one night to Pittsburgh, one night to New Zealand and the next to Paris.

"You'd prove that human beings are all linked together," he says. "That would be really swinging."

And that's "swinging" in that good British/American sense of the word.

Anna Rosenstein is a freelance theater critic.

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