Australia's most honored, beloved, (and Tony-winning) housewife, Dame Edna Everage, is proud to welcome producers Robert G. Bartner and the Ambassador Theatre Group on-board her new Broadway extravaganza It's All About Me.
As previously announced, It's All About Me will preview on Saturday, March 6th in preparation for a Tuesday, March 23rd, opening at a Shubert Organization theater.
Robert G. Bartner (Producer) produces in NY and London. Broadway: The Seagull, Boeing-Boeing (Tony), Rock 'n' Roll, Company (Tony), Sweeney Todd, Faith Healer. Off-Broadway: Wit (Pulitzer). West End: La Cage aux Folles, West Side Story (UK).
Ambassador Theatre Group (Producer) ATG is the largest theatre group in the West End and separately, the second largest in the UK regions, with a total of 23 venues. ATG's portfolio of theatres include high-profile and historic buildings such as the Comedy,
Donmar Warehouse, Duke of York's, Piccadilly, Savoy and Trafalgar Studios. Recent ATG co-productions include Broadway: Guys and Dolls, Sondheim's Tony Award-winning Company, Sweeney Todd (also London). West End/UK: West Side Story,
Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard, Riflemind (with Sydney Theatre Company), Fat Pig by
Neil LaBute,
Harold Pinter's The Lover/The Collection, Elling, the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess.
This is
Dame Edna's third return to Broadway, following her smash hit (and Tony & Drama Desk Award-winning)
Dame Edna: The Royal Tour in 1999, and 2004's Tony Nominated
Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance.
Dame Edna: It's All About Me will be directed by four time Tony award winner
Jerry Zaks, who most recently directed
Chazz Palminteri's hit solo Broadway show A Bronx Tale.
Dame Edna Everage, housewife, megastar, investigative journalist, social anthropologist, children's book illustrator, diseuse, chanteuse, swami, monstre sacré, polymath, adviser to British royalty, grief counsellor, spin doctor and icon is, arguably, the most popular and gifted woman in the world today.
Her career began in Melbourne, Australia in 1956 (see her best selling autobiography My Gorgeous Life - published in England by Macmillan and in the United States by Simon & Schuster) and though in the Fifties when her journey as a performing artiste began she had a strictly cult following.
In the 1960s Mrs Everage - as she then was - did a series of one-woman shows with
Barry Humphries in her native Australia and occasional stage and television appearances in England. She first appeared on the British stage at the Fortune Theatre in 1968 in Just a Show which received a mixed reception from the critics, though rave notices from writers such as
John Osborne. This led to a short-lived television series on BBC The
Barry Humphries Scandals.
Dame Edna's career really blossomed during the Seventies when her success in Australia was repeated in Britain with stage shows including Housewife, Superstar and A Night With
Dame Edna. A Night With
Dame Edna won the Society of West End Managements award for the best comedy performance of the year in 1979. In this decade the Melbourne housewife/performer was awarded a damehood (a high British honour for her services to culture) and in the Eighties she embarked on a series of spectacular stage and television shows including An Audience With
Dame Edna and Another Audience With
Dame Edna where she captivated a studio audience of celebrities for over an hour with her off-the-cuff replies to unrehearsed questions fired by audience members.
Dame Edna's stage appearances in London have been legendary and she has performed to large audiences throughout in the Royal
Albert Hall and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, often described as the greatest theatre in the world.
Her innovative television presentations have been copied by many, but never equalled. Edna also hosted two series of her own inventive chat show, The
Dame Edna Experience where her past guests have included
Jane Fonda,
Charlton Heston,
Liza Minelli,
Sean Connery and Mel Gibson and Julio Inglesias. She has also recorded similar television specials for the NBC and Fox Networks, where her guests have included Kim Bassinger,
Robin Williams,
Chevy Chase and
Barry Manilow. Her butlers over the years have been
Charlton Heston, Caesar Romero and
Burgess Meredith. Her TV special A Night on Mount Edna won the foremost European TV Entertainment Award "The Golden Rose of Montreux 1991". Edna's other notable awards include a British Academy Award, first prizes at the San Francisco International Film Festival and Gold Awards at the New York Film and TV Festival. She is also a star in Western Europe, having just completed a series of sell-out stage appearances in Germany. In 1994 she was honoured with the top Scandinavian award for the most popular TV personality in Denmark.
Since her television programmes for the NBC and Fox networks proved to be so successful, she has been a popular interviewee on talk shows such as Carson, Leno, Arsenio and Donaghue. Three years ago she performed the famous NBC New Year's Eve 'Countdown' in Times Square, and she has plans for a fact-finding mission to the United States in selected theatres. More recently, she hosted the Montreal Comedy Festival to great acclaim.
Dame Edna's imaginative variations on the talk show theme, where she often left the studio, making excursions to supermarkets to pick up provisions and surprise guests, only to return to the set and resume the show, are devices which have since cropped up on Leno and Letterman - naturally, without acknowledgement. It could be justly said that the Australian housewife has decisively influenced the formerly staid and ponderous American talk show.
Her books include
Dame Edna's Coffee Table Book,
Dame Edna's Bedside Companion, Lost Monasteries of Bulgaria, her famous autobiography My Gorgeous Life and her new book (in the pipeline) Love Your Husband's Prostate.
Dame Edna is Jewish (in a former life) and has three grown-up children. She spends her time visiting world leaders and jet setting between her homes in Malibu, London, Sydney and Switzerland. She is the founder and Governor of 'Friends of the Prostate' and the World Women's Prostate Olympics.
Dame Edna is the subject of an important study by the theatre historian and New Yorker critic,
John Lahr -
Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western Civilisation
She is the patron and founder of EdnaCare (Switzerland), which leases her services worldwide. Her hobbies are having afternoon tea with Stephen Hawking and compassionate photography. She especially likes lensing her fashionable friends in Aspen and Gstaad, and war orphans.
Her motto is: I'm sorry, but I care.
Jerry Zaks most recently directed
Chazz Palminteri's hit solo show A Bronx Tale on Broadway, and the acclaimed
City Center Encores! production of Stairway to Paradise. He has received four Tony Awards, four Drama Desks, two Outer Critics Circle Awards, an Obie and an NAACP Image Award nomination for his national tour of The Tap Dance Kid. He has directed more than 30 productions in New York, including Guys and Dolls (Tony Award), Six Degrees of Separation (Tony Award), Lend Me a Tenor (Tony Award), House of Blue Leaves (Tony Award), A Funny Thing...Forum (Tony Award nomination), Smokey Joe's Café (Tony Award nomination), Anything Goes (Tony Award nomination), La Cage aux Folles (Tony Award, Outstanding Musical Revival), The Foreigner (Obie Award), The Marriage of Bette and Boo (Obie Award), The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Little Shop of Horrors, The Man Who Came to Dinner, A Bad Friend, The Front Page, Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Assassins (Drama Desk nomination), Wenceslas Square, Sister Mary Ignatius..., Beyond Therapy and The Civil War. He also directed the Old Vic's production of The Philadelphia Story in London, starring
Kevin Spacey, as well as the award-winning film Marvin's Room, starring
Meryl Streep and
Diane Keaton. Mr. Zaks served as resident director at
Lincoln Center Theater from 1986-1990 and is a founding member of the
Ensemble Studio Theatre. He has also directed episodes for the long-running hit comedies "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Frasier" and "Two and a Half Men." A graduate of Dartmouth with an MFA from Smith, he received the SSDC's
George Abbott Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in 1994 and an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Dartmouth in 1999. Since 1990 he has been proudly affiliated with
Jujamcyn Theaters.
