My ability to get obsessed with something—be it food, books, music, theater, whatever—usually happens unexpectedly and in an instant. Kiki & Herb are one such obsession: in the heat of a moment my interest in them shifted radically from passive to fevered. I saw them for the first time at the Cherry Lane Theater (“Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théatre”) five or so years ago and thought it was really funny—especially the bits about Kiki’s father (“A lot of people jumped out of windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929, but not all of them died. My father was such a man”) and the “Whitey’s on the Moon” trilogy (a bulldozing medley beginning with the spoken word piece by Gil Scott-Heron, segueing into Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” and finally Talking Heads’ “Once In a Lifetime”—and you know, I think there’s also some Wu-Tang Klan in there, too)—but left it at that. In fact, I think I saw that show two or three times, and even at that point, it felt like a healthy, casual admiration.
Something has changed dramatically over the past two years, though. First of all, they were supposed to die (the 2004 Carnegie Hall show, which I stupidly did not see, was meant to be their last one), but they didn’t. Their comeback show, “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” which was nominated for a Tony Award, proclaimed that they actually would never be dying (they disclosed that they were in fact inside the manger at Jesus' birth and drank the milk of the cow that ate Jesus’ afterbirth, and are thus immortal). Sometime in between my multiple viewings of that production, I bought the recording of the 2004 Carnegie Hall show, and it was then, upon hearing their cover of “Running Up that Hill,” that, subtly but instantaneously, I was no longer just a loyal patron: I was a Fan.
I can’t talk about Kiki & Herb without emphasizing that what they do is more than entertainment. Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman are so just goddamn smart and they work really hard. Kiki reenacts scenes with Joan of Arc, Lillian Hellman, Adolf Hitler, Billie Holliday, William Burroughs, and others, and a large part of what they offer is a hilarious and pointed historical sweep, enlivened by their involvement in all of it. They were there for Jesus’ crucifixtion, William Burroughs shooting his wife, Princess Grace’s Bastille Day Ball… At one point she proclaims, “First it was the communists. Then it was the war on drugs, now it’s this and that. You know, the main thing is to have an invisible enemy that there’s no chance in hell of you ever catching.” And it appears that Kiki’s politics are far left of left, but by asserting that an adopted white baby is “a status symbol” nowadays, it’s pretty clear that few really escape her scrutiny. Sometimes you even wonder if she’s gone too far, like when she argues that in the fifties, marriage was one of the only ways that women “could get out from under their fathers” (striking a similar chord as their oft quoted assertion that, “If you weren’t molested by your father, you must have been an ugly kid.”)
And I’m convinced that they work incredibly hard on this stuff. (Maybe I'm stating the obvious here.) Coupled with a stroke of genius, one doesn’t pen a medley of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Joy Division) and “Temptation” (New Order) and make it a grand finale to a retirement concert without giving it a great deal of thought. Their signature number—Meat Loaf’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” but bookended with Pat Benetar’s “Love Is a Battlefield”—is no simple feat either. The banter is imaginative, perfectly plotted, and hilariously, seamlessly interwoven between songs. This is as good as Elaine Stritch or Kitty Carlisle Hart or Barbara Cook—a revue as notable for its breadth of scope as for its depth and, yes, wisdom—except in drag! And with really interesting songs! And for how funny and insightful most of their numbers are, I actually think that many are incredibly beautiful. “Heartbeats,” the song by The Knife, managed to elicit total silence from the audience the two times I heard it done. And their rendition of Pink Floyd’s “The Thin Ice”—which caps Kiki’s reenactment of Miss D.’s death and the ongoing guilt that she continues to grapple with—has actually made me cry.
And so they have recently released a DVD, the recording of a show I saw last year at the Knitting Factory. It was a sublime show, and this DVD is pretty sublime as well. It’s a different experience from watching them live, and not for the better or worse. One of the major advantages to the film is being able to pay more attention to Herb. Live, I’ve always felt that I should be watching him more closly, but Kiki commands the stage; this direction does a good job of keeping Herb in the frame and it significantly enhances the experience. And though I proclaim to be a Fan of them, I know that I missed out on many years' worth of their shows and can't claim authority here, but I do think that the DVD is a very good sampling of old and new material. In any case, it perfectly compliments the CD because the two have few overlapping numbers.
Word on the street has been that if either of their side projects (independent of each other) were to take off, that Kiki and Herb might retire for real—after all, they’ve been doing this act for at least fifteen or twenty years. It might be a good idea, if you haven’t checked them out before, to keep them on your radar.
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