Wednesday, October 15, 2003

By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic

Just what izzy, this Eddie Izzard?

He's a cult, to start. For his "Sexie" tour, the Byham was packed last night with an audience of all ages, youngish by Pittsburgh standards, juiced from the start to whoop it up for a cross-dressing English comedian known mainly from Premium HBO.

But for all the tinge of naughty in his garb -- red bustier in Act 1, black sheath in Act 2, stiletto-heeled boots and fake breasts in both -- Izzard is a sweet-faced intellectual comic, challenging his audience to keep up with his zigzagging stream-of-hip-consciousness. With a beautiful smile that could melt marble-faced bureaucrats, he exudes a joy in his own quick-change scatting that is infectious.

	Stage Preview Eddie Izzard wants to have an intimate chat with you

Call him a liberal arts education, the value of which, Kingman Brewster once said, is to give you more things to think about. Izzard gives you plenty. You may even need such an education to follow him, or at least an addiction to cable TV. Izzard is sort of like a Rorschach test of general knowledge, hip association, titillating transgression and imaginative leaps.

A very slow striptease, he calls it, set in a very large library. All he does is talk, accompanying himself with his own inventive array of mike-inflected sound effects. The tease is all mental.

His loose route map seems to be a sinuous, surreal journey from super heroes, Homer (not Simpson), aliens, Medusa and archeology to firemen, field artillery, dogs, fox hunting, imperialism, balsamic vinaigrette (a subject he shares with Dame Edna) and the difference between smokers and racists.

He's also a master improv artist with the guts to follow any stray thought. A rumble of thunder early in the show (two hours plus intermission) set him off on a jag about American weather vs. British. Then in Act 2, he demonstrated the quintessential improv skill of incorporation, weaving everything that had gone before back into the onrushing monologue.

It's not just surreal: He has plenty of fun with our Pittsburgh and American chauvinism and ignorance of the rest of the world, the country he calls "everywhere else." He plays skillfully off audience response, squelching it when necessary, and when he found out we didn't like Cleveland, he rubbed our face in our own parochialness.

But he's no smart aleck, is Eddie Izzard, a glint of the bad boy notwithstanding. He's very relaxed and very cool.

"Sexie" ends tonight at 8; call 412-456-6666.

Christopher Rawson can be reached at crawson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1666.

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