DAME Edna rules!
The mauve-haired Australian superstar has proved to be the biggest box-office draw on Broadway this year.
Her one-woman show, “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour,” has racked up a profit of $700,000, its producers said yesterday, making it the most successful production (thus far) of the 1999-2000 season.
The show, which wraps up its eight-month run at the Booth Theater on July 2, returned its initial $900,000 investment in just seven weeks.
Since then, the producers have distributed $100,000 to their investors “every two or three weeks,” Leonard Soloway, a co-producer of the show, told The Post.
The show’s success has made Dame Edna an extremely rich woman. She rivals Bernadette Peters, the star of “Annie Get Your Gun,” as the highest-paid performer on Broadway right now.
Theater sources familiar with Edna’s deal say that, since recoupment, she has received 25 percent of the weekly profits.
For the past month, weekly grosses have averaged about $200,000. The show is not expensive to run – industry sources say the overhead is around $100,000 – which means the Dame pockets between $25,000 and $30,000 a week.
Chase Mishkin, one of the producers, declined to comment on those numbers, but said Dame Edna’s percentage of the profits “was enormous. God knows, she’s making a lot of money.”
She stands to make even more money when she launches a nine-month national tour in October, playing theaters with two to three times the capacity of the Booth. Not bad for a performer whom many theater people thought would never catch on with Broadway audiences.
Edna, after all, was a big flop during her visit to New York in 1979.
“Her kind of insult humor was not as acceptable then as it is now,” said Soloway. “She’s the female version of Don Rickles.”
The producers say they had trouble finding investors for “The Royal Tour.”
“People didn’t have faith in Dame Edna,” said Mishkin. “It wasn’t until we were a success in San Francisco [where the show tried out] that we lined up all the money.”
Even New York theater people were skeptical.
“I know people tried to dissuade the Shuberts from giving us the Booth Theater, but they stuck to their word, even though I know they didn’t think we’d have a long run.”
But in previews, audiences took to the show immediately.
“A lot of guys at the show were obviously dragged in by their wives,” said Soloway. “But 15 minutes into it, they’re laughing so hard, they have tears running down their faces.”
Edna, whose core following in America for many years was gay people, is now mainstream, attracting not only “friends of [her son] Kenny” – as she calls gay men – but also suburbanites and tourists.
She shares her triumph, of course, with her partner, Barry Humphries, a Svengali-like figure who wrote “The Royal Tour” and who is even rumored to be Dame Edna herself.
Humphries clearly has mixed feelings about the success of “The Royal Tour.”
Accepting a special Tony for live performance Sunday night, he said: “My joy at receiving this award is tinged with some disappointment. I wrote a serious play, and Dame Edna, with her relentless ad-libbing, has turned my work of art into a frothy crowd pleaser.”
SO which shows benefited most from the Tony’s Sunday night?An interesting survey conducted by Audience Research & Analysis (ARA) immediately after the Tonys reveals, not surprisingly, that the big winners are the shows people most want to see.
ARA polled 1,116 theatergoers before the Tonys to find out which Broadway shows they were interested in seeing. “Kiss Me, Kate” was No. 1; “Aida,” No. 2; and “The Music Man,” No. 3. “Contact” ranked sixth.
After the Tonys, however, “Contact,” which won Best Musical, shot to second place. “Kate” still held the No. 1 spot and “Aida” fell to No. 3.
“Copenhagen,” which won the award for Best Play, jumped from fourth to first place on the must-see list. “The Real Thing,” which was named Best Revival, shot from sixth to second place. And “A Moon for the Misbegotten” dropped from first place to third.
WITH “The Wild Party” closing Sunday, let’s take one more swipe at Mandy (“I’m a nut!”) Patinkin, just for old time’s sake.
Patinkin refused to perform on the Tonys unless his producer, The Public Theater, agreed to give him the Tony weekend off.
The Public said yes, angering his fellow cast members, who have put up with his bizarre offstage behavior – and string of absences – for months.
“He performed in part of a four-minute segment, and didn’t even have to sing, because it was pre-recorded,” fumed one production source.
How strenuous!
Good thing he was well rested.
ENDNOTE: “The Bomb-itty of Errors,” the off-Broadway hip-hop musical based on Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors,” will close June 18, after 228 performances.