KIKI & HERB: ALIVE ON BROADWAY
(three and a half stars)
Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 W. 44th St., between Broadway and Eighth Avenue; (212) 944-9450. Through Sept. 10.
THEY’RE not dead yet. Far, far from it.
Still, when two years ago you an nounce your farewell concert – at Carnegie Hall, no less – and call it “Kiki & Herb Will Die For You,” it sounds like the long goodbye, and there is nothing left for fans but tears and a quest for closure.
But last night at the Helen Hayes Theatre, Justin Bond (Kiki) and Kenny Mellman (Herb), superlative actors and musicians both, resuscitated their lounge-act extraordinaire under the defiant title of “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway.”
Alive, and we might add, well! Very well, indeed. But on dear old conventional Broadway? Here could be the rub.
This is not a show for everyone. If you live anywhere in the New York area, fine. But although it’s quintessential showbiz, I doubt whether Kiki and Herb would play well in Peoria.
The show itself is part cabaret act, part musical, but most of all it’s a play.
Bond and Mellman have, it seems, been absorbed by the other reality of Kiki and Herb so that by now – and they have been in business as this duo for 13 years – their performance becomes a kind of weird documentary.
The audience gets to meet this sleazy, woozy cabaret act, less a tour de force than a force de tour, with Kiki as the sloshed chantooze with an age so certain that her face wears it like a birth certificate, and the blankly smiling Herb, as her quietly nutty accompanist.
During the course of the performance, they steadily drink Canadian Club as the evening shipwrecks itself on the wilder shores of life and show business.
Kiki’s enunciation gets more and more slurred (but always bitterly intelligible), while Herb’s playing crashes out like an avant-gardist gone berserk but still momentarily recalling Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Kander or even Philip Glass.
The show – “created and executed” by Bond and Mellman, with no director intervening – provides Kiki and Herb’s full biographical paraphernalia for those who are coming fresh to the act.
Apart from the biography, the text is crammed with political satire – Kiki is not a Bush type – and with a drunken, sometimes savage political incorrectness.
Bond’s drag-queen regality suggests Dame Edna on speed and talent, but there is a blackness to the humor – “I know my father loved me because he told me, if you weren’t abused as a child you must have been an ugly kid.” Shocking? Sure, and there is plenty more.
Good taste is not on the menu. The targets range from Mel Gibson to the pope – perhaps that’s no great extension – and Kiki spiralingly ad-libs from gay marriage (their core audience is pink-tinged) to the loneliness of sexy fat women.
Herb’s music is fantastic – it’s basically reinventions of rock, pop, hip-hop and hiccup styles all fused together – a stream of musical consciousness.
The encore finale – stay in your seat at the end – is a wondrous vampire anthem embracing all bases, from Elton John to Stephen Sondheim.
Of course, the milk of inhuman kindness has curdled in Kiki’s prosthetic breasts, and Herb constantly verges on manic insanity – yet, strange but true, with their souls intact, they emerge as essentially nice people, even if, unlike Barbra, they are the kind of nice people who don’t need nice people.