THE Prince of Wales is readying himself to meet his mother, or at least a more flamboyant stage version of Queen Elizabeth II, when he and the Duchess of Cornwall attend the campest show in San Francisco tonight as their eight-day tour of America enters a more relaxed phase.

Beach Blanket Babylon, a spoof musical, has been parodying celebrities from Richard Nixon, the late president, to Paris Hilton since the show was first performed more than 30 years ago at the Club Fugazi in a gay district by Steve Silver, a homosexual activist.

Tonight’s performance will be tweaked for the royal visitors. “The Queen of England will be in there and there will be a few more special bits, but we are not allowed to talk about those. We are all very excited,” said Charles Zukow, a spokesman for the show.

The musical — whose trademark outrageous headgear may meet approval from the duchess — marks the end of the more formal half of the first American tour by the royal couple. The visit has been characterised by two meals with President George W Bush at the White House and a brief visit late on Friday to New Orleans to meet a few of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Yesterday they were in Marin county, California, 40 miles north of San Francisco — a famously insular area that is the epicentre of America’s organic food movement.

“Here in Marin county, where 50% of the land is agricultural, it is organic farmers who are treated like royalty,” quipped The New York Times yesterday. The prince, it said, would “encounter a sensibility not unlike his own” among the hippies-turned-organic entrepreneurs who “consider goat’s cheese and micro-greens as high art”.

The richest of the 58 counties in California — itself the wealthiest state in America — Marin county was mocked by George Bush Sr, the former president, two years ago as the home of wealthy white liberals whom he referred to scathingly as “hot tubbers”.

To reflect the more informal tone of this stage of the tour, the royal couple have cut down their staff from 40 to 14 and dispatched many of the duchess’s 50 frocks back to Britain in advance of their return to London this week.

Charles is likely to feel more at home at Point Reyes than in Washington. Locals such as George Lucas, who filmed parts of the Star Wars films in Marin county, boast they eat more organic vegetables than anyone else in the world, if only because they can afford the prices.

Point Reyes also had its own brush with British history. It is the closest town to Drake’s Bay where Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan buccaneer, is said to have established the doomed colony of Nova Albion and laid a royal claim to the future California in 1579. The prince is believed to have expressed an interest in visiting, but ran out of time.

California has turned out to be a refreshing change from the first half of the trip, whose tone was set by a poll in USA Today which said that 81% of Americans were not interested in meeting Charles or his new wife.

The Miami Herald declared it was “the un-Diana tour, in which a couple of middle-aged, earnest eccentrics from the English countryside take an educational trip abroad”. People magazine wrote off the prince as “the chap with the kilts and all those big houses”.

The muted reception given to the prince’s new wife was in stark contrast to that accorded Diana, Princess of Wales who was a massive hit in America after she danced with John Travolta at the White House during a visit in 1985.

Nevertheless, the Diana fanatics who had threatened to disrupt the tour in Washington failed to materialise.

Officially the visit was designed to “enhance the special relationship” between Britain and America, with the prince describing himself as a goodwill ambassador. It was a strategy emphasised when the royal couple visited the site of the World Trade Center in New York and then laid a wreath at a new second world war memorial in Washington.

The pair, who had lunch yesterday at an organic farm, left such weighty issues behind them as they prepared for a night at the theatre. An aide said the Goons fan was bound to appreciate its zaniness: “The Queen saw it in San Francisco in 1983 and enjoyed it, so it has the royal stamp of approval.”

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