KIKI & HERB: Alive on Broadway Reviews (8/15/06)

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/15/06 at 7:33pm

Well here we go folks...another season, another opennin', another show! Let the reviews roll.

The first is mixed to fairly positive from TALKIN BROADWAY.

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/world/kikiherb.html






Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway

Theatre Review by Matthew Murray - August 15, 2006
Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway Created and executed by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman. Scenic design by Scott Pask. Lighting design by Jeff Croiter. Costume design by Marc Happel. Sound design by Brett Jarvis.
Theatre: Helen Hayes Theatre, 240 West 44th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue
Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including intermission
Audience: May be inappropriate for 12 and under. (Strong language; adult themes.) Children under the age of 4 are not permitted in the theatre.
Schedule: Tuesday at 7pm, Wednesday through Friday @ 8pm, Saturday at 2pm and 8pm, Sunday at 3pm. Limited engagement through September 10
Ticket price: $87.50
Tickets: Telecharge

The reports of their deaths have been greatly exaggerated. Kiki and Herb's disappearance following their landmark 2004 Carnegie Hall concert did not mean, as some feared, that one of New York's longest-standing (and longest-drinking) institutions had sashayed elegantly off this distressing mortal coil. It's now clear they were merely lying in wait, gathering their strength, and preparing for the greatest challenge of their careers: their Broadway debut.

In their quest to knock audiences dead, they've come to the Great White Way prepared. Perhaps, dare one say it, overprepared. Only their most ardent of fans, who can't feast often enough on Justin Bond's shattered, chattering chanteuse Kiki, or on Kenny Mellman's demonically driven piano player Herb, will be well equipped to not just survive the laudanum-infused spectacle at the Helen Hayes, but thrive on it. Just about everyone else can expect Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway to be an enigma inside a puzzle swathed in studded satin.

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This allows to them to milk each moment for all it's worth. A sloshed Kiki mounting or dismounting an onstage tree that looks as decrepit as she does (Scott Pask designed the absurdly autumnal set) ranks as priceless physical comedy on its own; later, when she diverts from the planned program with a special number for "the children," the nonsense she's singing can't quite compare to Herb's forehead-slapping exasperation at her over-indulgence.
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Even when their drawn-out antics bore or frustrate most, it's hard not to admire - perhaps even love? - the giddily insane perpetrators. As Kiki points out, it's much more difficult to love than it is to die, which means that's some sort of an accomplishment. Not that they have yet mastered either, and if they don't learn by September 10, when Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway is scheduled to close, then perhaps in the future. Even if these two never return to Broadway, one can't help but feel they'll never go away again.





Updated On: 8/15/06 at 07:33 PM

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/15/06 at 9:05pm

Broadway.com RAVES for Kiki & Herb

http://www.broadway.com/gen/Buzz_Story.aspx?ci=534952

For those of us who have seen Kiki and Herb perform in funky downtown clubs over the years, it's something of a shock to find them on Broadway, of all places. After all, the outrageously outspoken, booze-guzzling chanteuse Kiki is actually a flamboyantly attired man (Justin Bond), and political correctness isn't exactly this duo's strong point. For instance, Kiki never fails to mention that her accompanist Herb (Kenny Mellman) is a "gay Jewtard" (gay, retarded and Jewish). Against all odds, Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway brings their hip, bitingly funny act uptown.
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With a deep, raspy voice, Bond's seventysomething Kiki puts her indelible stamp on a wide range of pop tunes. Backed by Mellman on the piano, she makes Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lange Syne" alternately touching and uproarious. Another first act highlight is Bright Eyes' "First Day of My Life." Before launching into the song, she says, "I'm going to try to manufacture some genuine emotion." Kiki also brays Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype," which she dubs folk music.
The second-act selections are just as eclectic. There's a deranged glint in Kiki's eyes when she sings the Cure's "Let's Go to Bed." Next up is one of the duo's standards, "One Tin Soldier." Though I've heard Kiki perform it many times, I've never seen her throw herself into the song so completely. In the middle of it she did an inspired balletic leap that seemed improvised.
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During her concerts, Kiki's preferred drink is Canadian Club Whiskey—or a drink that resembles whiskey—and she gets increasingly looped as the night wears on. A bottle is stashed away in a tree where she perches from time to time. (Scott Pask's quirky set also features a giant leaf behind Herb's piano.) Back when Kiki and Herb performed at downtown venues like Fez, Kiki would occasionally throw drinks at unruly customers or make patrons leave if they talked during her act. That doesn't happen now that she's on Broadway, but Kiki hasn't lost her edge. She does, after all, call the current Pope a Nazi and rues the state of America since "the Christians" took over the government.

I'm not sure if tourists will take a chance on Kiki and Herb, and if they do I'm not sure what they will make of the nutty duo. But the pair's admirers should fill the Helen Hayes Theatre for this limited run. And if they're anything like me, they won't mind hearing some of the songs and stories one more time. After all, Kiki and Herb have come to feel like lovably demented old friends. I, for one am thrilled that they're back from the dead and are breathing zany life into Broadway during the dog days of August.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/16/06 at 12:03am

Another Positive-Rave from NEWSDAY...

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/ny-etkiki4851873aug16,0,5870830.story?coll=ny-theater-headlines

Kiki & Herb, the parody lounge act who turn several generations of pop music into alternately screechy and treacly cabaret, are an acquired taste. For the initiated, these downtown provocateurs are absurdist geniuses who go miles beyond the cheesy irony of, say, "Saturday Night Live's" Sweeney Sisters. Beneath the guise of seedy show biz send-up, fans tell us, Kiki & Herb's secret weapon is coruscating satire.

To be sure, in an unlikely new month-long turn on the Main Stem, "Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway," the demented duo delivers an evening of song, shtick, and social commentary you'd never see at the Carlyle. At her best, Kiki (Justin Bond), a staggering blond chanteuse with a brassy, weather-beaten voice and a taste for meandering patter, is like a twisted amalgam of 20th century divas who lost their way in the '60s amid the baffling rise of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (Mae West's "Twist and Shout," anyone?). In this context, Kiki's renditions of everything from Public Enemy's "Don't Believe the Hype" to Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne," as well as her unhinged narrative digressions, play like the so-wrong-they're-right products of an addled mind.
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When Kiki is tearing like a bug-eyed banshee through the Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama Out" or making a melodrama out of the twee anti-war anthem "One Tin Soldier," no one can touch her (and few would dare). And it must be said that Scott Pask's forest-themed set pieces, lit like Christmas candy by Jeff Croiter, make a witty match for the act's dubious glitter. But while fans shouldn't hesitate, the unconverted are likely to remain so after witnessing "Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway."

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/16/06 at 12:13am

BRANTLEY gets another one RIGHT in my Book!

An all out RAVE from the NY TIMES:

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/theater/reviews/16kiki.html?adxnnl=1&ref=arts&adxnnlx=1155701235-OKitBWUl9vl2wj4ZTACw7Q

That’s one gorgeous set of teardrops that the immortal Kiki DuRane is wearing for her mind-popping Broadway debut. Kiki, a molting songbird for all seasons, and Herb, her happily suffering shadow and accompanist, opened last night at the Helen Hayes Theater in “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” a hyper-magnified cabaret concert that has the heat and dazzle of great balls of fire.

Actually, since this transcendental lounge act is fond of biblical imagery, make that great swords of fire — or, if you prefer, a burning bush.

But about those teardrops. Whenever Kiki tilts her face upward, toward her key light — and like any self-adoring goddess, she does that a lot — her eyes brim with the most brilliant pools of brine you have ever seen. Well, not to spoil the illusion, but those ain’t tears: they’re rhinestones (or something like), strategically glued just beneath her lower lashes.
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But like most of the best artists of their generation, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman have tunneled under the ironic distance that seems to have been their birthright to reclaim the passion beneath the pose. The musical stylings of Herb (whose liquidly bobbing head and blissed-out expression suggest that his nervous system is located in the strings of his piano) and the vocals of Kiki are radioactive with an angry sorrow, ecstasy and cosmic fatigue so profound that it turns into cosmic punch-drunkenness. They use the surface of camp as a tool for detonating surfaces. (Bette Midler surprised and seduced audiences with just such a style as a singer at gay clubs 30-some years ago.)

It’s a musical approach that finds a common denominator in songs made famous by artists like Public Enemy (quaintly presented as an example of folk music) and the Scissors Sisters and sentimental narratives like “One Tin Soldier” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne.” And who else would segue from the masochistic power ballad “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into a musical setting of William Butler Yeats’s “Second Coming”?
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At one point Kiki looks into the audience and wonders who on earth is out there. This is Broadway, after all, the place where tourists come from around the country with their families to be entertained. “Do any of you have a family?” she asks of the crowd and concludes that this must be an audience of foundlings.

Maybe. But remember that the subtitle of the show, which runs only through Sept. 10, is “Alive on Broadway,” not merely “Live.” Though they may disappear when the lights go down, and the makeup comes off, Kiki and Herb onstage are Alive with a capital A, with all the human vitality and fallibility that that implies. This is more than can be said for the synthetically enhanced automatons appearing in most Broadway musicals.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/16/06 at 7:55am

The NYPOST gives it 3 1/2 Stars and is POSITIVE!

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.
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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.
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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.

[LaCageAuxFollesFan2]

Posted: 8/16/06 at 8:01am

NY DAILY NEWS is Fairly Mixed:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/story/443718p-373710c.html


At 140 minutes, with intermission, the show goes on too long. A director (there's none listed on the Playbill) might have edited. As it stands, "Alive on Broadway" is, like Kiki's liver, bloated - even if die-hard devotees never wanted the show to end.