all sparks

last night i went with 00soul, coiledsoul, and mimi to the opening of eddie izzard's "stripped" at the kodak theatre, which is there through saturday. what's with the hot tux and skin-flashing in the ad, eddie? you wore faded jeans, a striped shirt, and a tailcoat with a red lining (loved it!) on stage, and didn't take ANYTHING off. and the show wasn't exactly revealing on any other level, either.

whatevs. he performed on a set that was perhaps meant to evoke stone tablets (there was some shtick involving moses), or a prison cell (what with the painted-on small barred window at the back of the set, where the "outside" scene shifted from a sunrise to a big eye peering in to the moon rolling slowly by), and the show basically amounted to eddie izzard's (extremely nonlinear) history of the world, part 1. as learned on wikipedia and the internet -- ahaha.

he was very funny, but the show was pretty loose. i mean, it's long been part of EI's thing to ramble off on a tangent for many minutes and then make a motor-type noise (as though speeding back to the point) and go, "uh, where was i ... OH! noah's ark ... ." so, it wasn't so much the patented meandering, but the not-so-easy-to-hide lack of much depth. we all agreed we'd have liked more focus, not necessarily in the presentation, but in the sense that he didn't have a lot to say. beyond "vote for barack obama" and "humans have a lotta potential" -- which, great, but is that it?

oh, well. much of the nearly two-hour show was hilarious, especially that noah's ark stuff, including some recurring squirrel shtick ... a bit about "jazz chickens" ... the assortment of sound effects he made ... some wordplay involving latin, hannibal, and elephants ... and his routine about the stone age. still, it felt a little bit lazy, with a strong whiff of resting on his laurels about it. like he was content to just be "eddie izzard" and not really push things forward. which, ok -- i guess that happens to everyone. and it's been a long time since i wrote that cover story about him (never mind the mess made of the headlines and subheads in the online presentation) -- nearly five years, in fact. but in it he did speak of wanting to "... really push it, because when you get in a comfort zone, it's bad."

i wouldn't call "stripped" bad, but it's certainly not his best. oh, well. i guess they can't all be "dress to kill." but, then again, why not?