I, the tasteful one

Cleveland —  This city is so lovely at this time of year. Just ask Dame Edna Everage, gracious star of “A Night With Dame Edna: The Show That Cares,” appearing during this precious moment between Midwestern winter and spring at Cleveland’s Palace Theatre.

Like the whopping rhinestones in her jewelry, Dame Edna fits perfectly into any setting. She is much happier sharing her loving, caring observations here than she would be on Broadway, “in front of nicely dressed people.” She exhorts the “paupers” in the balcony -- les miserables -- to hold on tight to prevent “a downpour of the disadvantaged, a Niagara of nonentities” from tumbling over the edge.

She even proves willing to share her secret to happiness with America’s industrial Midwest: the ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others.

Despite the almost unseemly love that flows between Dame Edna and her dear Ohio “possums” as they wave their gladioluses during the show’s finale, the man behind the glittering glasses, Barry Humphries, says fans rarely venture backstage. Why, he asks, would one want to spoil the fantasy by exposing oneself to a tweedy, soft-spoken 69-year-old Australian character actor who is nothing like the Dame?

It’s not as though Humphries seeks to deny his existence; he simply chooses to divorce it from Edna’s. And divorce is something in which Humphries -- a father of four now happily married to fourth wife Lizzie Spender, daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender -- has some expertise.

Humphries receives program credit as “deviser and writer” and includes a biography that reveals Humphries created Mrs. Norm Everage, the dowdy Melbourne housewife who has since morphed into the glorious Dame Edna, in 1955.

Still, Humphries usually chooses to deal with the press via brief interviews as Dame Edna by phone to avoid getting into the elaborate costume and makeup. So spending a day -- or more accurately, the hours between breakfast and his regular pre-show nap -- with Humphries, as Humphries, in lovely, lovely Cleveland is an uncommon privilege.

The actor is discovered looking lost outside the Ritz-Carlton, in brown felt hat, plaid scarf and black Burberry coat, near the limousine that will whisk us to the renowned Cleveland Museum of Art. Something Edna-ites may not know: Humphries is an artist, whose works are represented by Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane, Australia.

“I’ve painted since my earliest youth, and I’ve always been quite good, I must admit,” he says. “I was very good at doing caricatures of schoolmasters in particular, and I guess I am a theatrical caricaturist today.” Now, he paints landscapes, often traveling with his easel, calling the work a form of meditation.

Humphries declines to anoint himself a connoisseur of art but says: “I’ve always been keen on it. I’ve had a large number of collections; every time I get divorced, I lose all my pictures and start again -- it’s a good idea, really. I bestow them upon these lovely women who kindly marry me. I turn them into art collectors.”

He refuses to be photographed in the limo; Humphries finds such vehicles “horrible, vulgar.” During the vulgar, horrible ride, he stares out a window, reacting with Edna-ish concern to the blighted blocks that characterize a city that can also boast one of the country’s finest art museums. He recalls the same phenomenon in Detroit and in Louisville. “It all looks a bit like Dusseldorf in 1945,” he observes.

Cornering the local angle

Humphries tailors his show to the city he’s in. Beginning Thursday, it’s beautiful, beautiful Costa Mesa, where Dame Edna will appear at the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s Segerstrom Hall. When he hits town, he quizzes the journalists who interview him. “Who’s the local fat lady? Who’s the socialite who gets on everyone’s nerves? Who’s the corrupt mayor? What’s the latest scandal?” he asks. “You know which is the Jewish suburb, where the ghetto is, the trailer park, where the nouveau riche live. And because Edna doesn’t know about political correctness, she feels no real harm in telling the truth.”

He tries to figure out what might offend a local audience -- then makes sure to include it. “There is a kind of gasp at the slightest thing, really. People are very unused to the frankness that Edna dispenses,” he says. “It’s rather enjoyable to slightly shock.”

He remains disoriented by America’s definition of Cleveland as the Midwest, since it’s not in the middle. Still, the United States is so vast that Humphries believes he can go on playing Edna here forever.

A megahit in London in the mid-1970s with his show “Housewife Superstar!,” Humphries soon tested New York. Through word of mouth, people began to discover the show. Then along came a certain critic from the New York Times. He waited 20 more years to return to performing in the States: “I thought he should be dead by then,” he says of the disparaging reviewer, whom he does not name.

It was not the death of the critic but TV success with specials, “The Dame Edna Experience” talk show and chats with the likes of Jay Leno that eventually led Humphries to Broadway and a special Tony Award in 2000. Dame Edna was asked to be a recurring character on “Ally McBeal,” and Humphries was the voice of Bruce, the great white shark in “Finding Nemo.”

Humphries loved “Ally McBeal” and “Nemo” but approaches most Hollywood offers with skepticism. “The one word I can’t stand in Los Angeles is ‘excited,’ ” he says. “ ‘Mr. Humphries, we’re very excited about this project.’ What they’re saying is: ‘We’d like to have talks with you because if you become a star, we didn’t miss anything.’ But they’re not going to give you a job because if they’re wrong, they’ll get fired. So they are just getting excited all the time. They are in a permanent state of sub-orgasm.”

The stage is more honest. “Although it’s very uncomfortable on the road, I’ve decided that’s what I do,” Humphries muses. “Reluctantly, I’ve come to accept the reality that I’m sort of an itinerant. Although my pictures and books and clothes are elsewhere, in Sydney and London, I’m in the Ritz-Carlton in Cleveland.”

Uncomfortable on the road, perhaps -- but delighted to scamper through the halls of the Cleveland Museum of Art, looking for a particular work by one of his favorite artists, Jean-Charles Cazin, and offering unsolicited art reviews.

When in Los Angeles, Humphries visits museums with friend David Hockney: “He sees more than you or I would ever see,” he says dreamily. Humphries knew Surrealist Salvador Dali too. Loves his work, but “when I knew him, he was sort of cultivating a kind of desperate eccentricity. I didn’t see him at his height.”

But if Humphries and Hockney go arting together any time soon, they’ll skip Brentwood’s Getty Museum. “When you go to a very rich person’s house, you wonder why he hasn’t got better stuff,” Humphries says, clearly winding up to a punch line. “You wonder: ‘Why is his tie so awful? Why are the cushions so worn? Why wasn’t lunch better?’ You always wonder the same thing about the Getty Museum, particularly since it’s all housed in something that looks like a hospital.”

Here in Cleveland, Humphries is drawn to “Interior of a Synagogue” by Italian painter Alessandro Magnasco, whose work appeals because it is “so fantastical -- desolate mountains, hermits, monks, the Gothic imagination.” He also seems mesmerized by Albert Pinkham Ryder’s “The Race Track” (a.k.a. “Death on a Pale Horse”): “It appeals to my darker nature.”

Faring less well today are Monet (“I get a bit sick of Monet, it’s sort of boiled sweets”), Renoir (“I don’t much like these early nudes; I like them later, when they’re more orange”), Tiffany glass (“I always thought Tiffany was a bit kitsch”) and Tiepolo. He loves Tiepolo -- just not the one Cleveland has. “I thought you’d have a better Tiepolo than that,” he gently scolds a museum official, then apologizes, saying he’s become spoiled because the Melbourne Museum houses one of the great Tiepolos.

Photography? Not interested. Contemporary art? Even less so. “You go to a museum, and you look in one door, and in the door is a pile of rocks and an attendant telling schoolchildren not to touch it,” he grumbles. “Then there’s a neon tube at an angle of 45 degrees, and then you see cliche Jasper Johnses and Cy Twomblys coating the walls. I walk right past it.”

Humphries leaves the museum happy with a sack of art books. “This is heavy as lead,” he says. “Everywhere I go I visit bookstores. It’s the first thing I do, I buy books, and then I have to have them shipped. I’ve now learned that the floor of my library in London is unsafe, it’s not able to bear the weight -- there are 15,000 books in one room. I fear the time will come when a museum gives me a catalog and it’ll be the one straw and it’ll all come down and I’ll be buried in books.” He gratefully accepts when the museum offers to ship the books directly.

He appears less pleased with the next stop: a restaurant in Cleveland’s picturesque Little Italy. It was endorsed by a museum staff member as one of the neighborhood’s finest -- also by local resident Jimmy DePalma, 50, enjoying the balmy 37-degree day on the bench out front. “All the restaurants here, nobody complains,” DePalma offers.

Humphries doesn’t complain either, but his eyes widen in horror as he enters the ornate interior, red as marinara sauce, or perhaps gall bladder surgery. “Did someone recommend this?” he asks of the restaurant, which remains nameless here out of respect. On the way to the table, he tunes in to the background music, gooey with violins. “It’s like being poisoned,” he observes.

But a lethal string section and no available arugula do not stop Humphries from enjoying the lunchtime experience; mild dissatisfaction becomes him. He talks enthusiastically about the idea of bringing some of his other characters to America. A favorite is Les Patterson, the alcoholic diplomat and lecher, who is even more popular than Edna in England and Australia. “He’s gross beyond belief, so much so that even old ladies like him -- he’s beyond dirty,” Humphries says.

Cross-dressing confusion

Dame EDNA is Humphries’ only female character. He is impatient with America’s snickering attitude toward a male actor portraying a “dame,” part of the long tradition of pantomime in the United Kingdom.

“I had a puzzling interview with a guy in Cincinnati. At the end of a very sensible interview he said: ‘Mr. Humphries, do you ever have to take your children aside and explain to them why you like to wear women’s clothes?’ ” he recalls. “I said: ‘If I were an actor playing Hamlet, would I have to take my children aside and say I wasn’t really Danish? I forgot that in some classes in America there is a certain psychopathology -- perhaps attributable to the Puritan background. This country was settled by people in tall black hats -- very, very sexually repressed people.”

Which brings us back to the question of American political correctness, and a 2003 incident in which Dame Edna’s lack of it landed Humphries in hot water. Dame Edna’s February advice column in Vanity Fair included the following response to a reader who asked whether she needed to learn Spanish:

“Forget Spanish. There’s nothing in that language worth reading except ‘Don Quixote,’ and a quick listen to the CD of ‘Man of La Mancha’ will take care of that. There was a poet named Garcia Lorca, but I’d leave him on the intellectual back burner if I were you .... Who speaks it that you are really desperate to talk to? The help? Your leaf blower? Study French or German, where there are at least a few books worth reading, or if you’re American, try English.”

The column sparked outrage among Latino organizations, spurred an angry letter from Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek -- whose photo coincidentally graced that issue’s cover -- and caused Vanity Fair to apologize and abruptly cancel Edna’s column.

It’s clear that Humphries is still seething. “There’s a literary form called satire,” he says evenly. “ ‘There’s some writer called Cervantes, some poet called Lorca, but you don’t have to worry about them.’ It’s a writer’s way of saying it’s a great language, and you in America have a Hispanic underclass that you pretend doesn’t exist. But you’re wasting your breath trying to explain it.”

He smiles sweetly. “Coincidentally, Edna has a Lebanese maid named Salma -- it’s just a coincidence. Edna also has a one-woman show about Frida Kahlo. She’s doing a self-portrait, she’s painting away -- the portrait has blue hair, rhinestone glasses, but a very, very thick mustache.”

Back in the vulgar, horrible limousine after lunch, Humphries becomes more sober, introspective. He confesses to being depressed about pushing 70. “I don’t feel old, you know?” He answers quietly, but honestly, when asked about his son, Oscar, 22, who attempted suicide by overdose on Christmas Day 2002. “He’s fine now,” he says. Humphries beat his own alcoholism more than 30 years ago. “Most people seem to have a health crisis in their lives somewhere,” he muses. “At some point your life seems like it will stretch on forever. But not always, not forever.”

That is why Humphries has made the wise decision to remain 69. And he says his outlook on life, as well as the landscapes he paints, remains generally as cheerful as the shower of gladioluses at the end of “A Night With Dame Edna,” although he complains: “I spend thousands of dollars on the bloody things.

“I was fishing for compliments once at a picture framer’s shop, and I brought some of my paintings in without signing them or saying who I was, and asked the framer, ‘What do you think of them?’ ” Humphries recalls with a smile. “And he said: ‘Well, whoever painted them certainly had a good time!’ Which is a nice sort of epitaph, really.”

*

A Night With Dame Edna

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, Segerstrom Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Thursday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 and 7 p.m.

Ends: March 21

Price: $34.50 to $64.50

Contact: (714) 740-7878 or (213) 365-3500. www.ocpac.org