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Hot!
Eddie Izzard’s unstoppable Sexie machine
BY JON GARELICK
Sexie
Written and performed by Eddie Izzard. Lighting design by Josh Monroe. Sound design by George Glossop. Scenic design by Alex Saad. Costume design by Charlotte Mann in association with Russell Sage. Music by Sarah McGuinness. At the Shubert Theatre through October 25.


If you’ve seen Eddie Izzard’s previous one-man shows, you know the drill: a very butch transvestite with an English accent riffing for a couple of hours in apparent free-form on everything from cross-dressing to politics and, well, sharks and flies. This is Izzard’s stand-up comedy routine. He’s also a well-respected actor who won a Tony nomination last season for his performance on Broadway in Peter Nichol’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. In Sexie — as in his previous one-man shows Dress To Kill and Circle — Izzard doesn’t exactly do jokes, and he doesn’t exactly do impressions. But the coda of his opening-night performance at the Shubert on Tuesday was a dead-on impression of Christopher Walken doing a soupçon of Shakespeare, bouncing freely among Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello, skidding suddenly into Walken’s "father’s watch" speech from Pulp Fiction. And it was hilarious.

That will give you an idea of where the humor comes from in Izzard’s performances — those whiplash juxtapositions and free-associations. Plenty of comedians improvise, but once a routine is established, it begins to settle. Izzard builds spontaneity into his shows, and if he’s not always free-associating, he knows how to create the illusion of improvisation. Whereas other comedians hit their beats with topic, set-up, joke, joke, joke, Izzard’s monologues career all over the place, even as he keeps returning to the subject at hand — whether it’s prosthetic breasts, the pope, or how to repel a shark attack.

Free-form doesn’t mean no-structure, however. Izzard knows he’s going to start by talking about his falsies ("You’ve lost some weight." "No, I’ve got big tits") and eventually get to superho’s and the fall of Troy ("Helen was stolen from Menelaus by Paris — who was some kind of personal shopper") and gun control. But how he’ll get from one topic to the next is anybody’s guess. And the smallest detail in an Izzard performance can turn into a motif. At the Shubert, whenever he was being put on the spot by a cop or a customs agent, he simply fondled his fake tits.

For all the outward "transgressive" trappings of an Izzard performance, he’s one of the cuddliest comedians around. After the obligatory Tom Jones on the PA (replete with "Thunderball" and, yes, "She’s a Lady"), the show starts with pounding-loud synthed-up rock and clouds of dry-ice smoke. Izzard enters dressed to the nines. In the first act (the show runs almost two hours plus half-hour intermission) at the Shubert, he wore a blue greatcoat with blue and gold piping over a red velvet bustier, black mini-skirt, and knee-high boots. After intermission, he returned in a "simple" spaghetti-strap black dress slit to the thigh. But when he turned away from the audience, those could have been a halfback’s bare shoulders. Izzard walks on his stiletto heels with a manly swagger, and he makes a point that he’s a hetero transvestite.

And he knows how to work audience rapport so that it doesn’t curdle into condescension. "I’m being ironic," he says after a burst of sincere applause for some political point. "I know you are too." Bigger laughs. The 41-year-old Izzard was born in Yemen (his father was an accountant for British Petroleum in Aden), and that gives him a sharp angle on post–September 11 humor, as he shows up at airports with a passport identifying his birthplace as one of the hotbeds of al-Qaeda activity. He wonders, among other things, why it’s 9/11 here and 11/9 everywhere else, and he takes off on a befuddled group of CIA researchers trying to identify a tape as depicting Osama bin Laden or not.

So this is a show where we hear about Medusa at the hairdresser, the invention of Gregorian chant (closely related to the Sirens’ song to Odysseus as well as to the Doppler effect), the overrated "closeness" this past summer of Mars to Earth, archæology, the importance of making criminals kill flies, the meaning of the word "bastard," and nuclear disarmament. Izzard delivers it all with sputtering charm and technique. (Listen to the way he cracks the high notes on those "or" syallables of Christopher Walken’s "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" Macbeth speech.) In his encore finale, he finds himself on the set of a Western in Mexico, riding a rocket-propelled horse across one border after another, barely pausing at customs long enough to rearrange a breast and deny Yemen.


Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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