Review: Kiki and Herb Seeking Asylum! at Joe’s Pub

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Kiki DuRane is prowling the floor of Joe’s Pub, growling out Pulp’s ode to sleaze, This Is Hardcore. “It’s going to be one hell of a night,” she sings. It already has been. It’s the third show of Seeking Asylum!, alt-cabaret superstars Kiki and Herb’s sold-out comeback run at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan. This is the encore. It’s midnight. The show started soon after 9.30pm and hasn’t let up since. Kiki sings on. “You can’t be a spectator. Oh, no. You got to take these dreams and make them whole.” By now, she’s in front of my seat, which is at a raised counter looking down into the front seating area. Kiki fixes me with a look of glinting lust, mounts the table beneath and lurches for the counter. I won’t be a spectator for long.

News of Kiki and Herb’s return to the stage for the first time since 2007 prompted a surge all of its own: the venue’s website crashed when tickets for the five-week run went on sale. Absence might make the heart grow fonder but the appeal is not just nostalgic. Kiki and Herb is an act of serious comic and musical power, at once sophisticated and uproarious, putting old-school chops at the service of future feminism. We still need them.

For the uninitiated, Kiki (played by Justin Vivian Bond) is an ageing singer and showgirl with a more than usually colourful past. In between sociopolitical ruminations and richly wrought anecdotes about her life and work, she sings from a wildly diverse repertoire, encompassing 20s jazz, post-punk, folk and hip hop – Billie Holiday to Wu-Tang Clan, Kate Bush to Joy Division – often mashed up in unexpected ways that meander then resolve. Kiki is accompanied on the piano by Herb (Kenny Mellman), a simpleminded Jewish homosexual who has been her partner on the international showbiz circuit since the 1950s, though they’ve actually been kicking around for two millennia. (It’s a long story, involving messianic placenta.) The singing and the playing make a show of careening in a ramshackle way from register to register, song to song, but it takes a lot of discipline to look that messy. It’s expressive art of a high order.

Since Bond and Mellman started performing together in 1992, their characters have evolved into a pair of holy fools for the post-Cold War era, charting a picaresque course through high society and the dark places of the world with a double-edged knack for both finding and escaping trouble. They’re like bastard royalty, forever rubbing shoulders (and sometimes other body parts) with stars and heads of state, forever about to be asked to leave. They’re as old as the hills but still, endearingly, a little naïve. Kiki is the brains of the outfit. It’s her animal cunning that really keeps the duo afloat. She has a sharp intellect as well as cunning, but it’s of limited practical use because she is pretty much shafted by her class and gender.

There’s an absurdity to that – an absurdity that underpins the whole act – an acute, sometimes shocking absurdity that acknowledges the howling injustice of the world – a savvy absurdity that finds solace in a shrug, a laugh and a song while keeping one eye on the exit door. It emerges in shady looks and throwaway lines (“it’s difficult to spend time with people once they’re dead”) and it stems from the act’s origins as a kick against the AIDS crisis, when a mountain of queer, poor and junkie bodies piled up, year upon year, preposterously unacknowledged by mainstream society. A generation had aged and mourned before its time; the wrinkles crudely painted on Bond and Mellman’s faces were a lie that told a truth. And the duo’s weird, sweet mutual support was a makeshift raft on a cruel sea where others found comfort too.

By the time they went on hiatus in 2007, Kiki and Herb had toured internationally and played Broadway and Carnegie Hall to great acclaim. Bond and Mellman could have kept on being Kiki and Herb but they broke it off. Bond became a feted solo cabaret performer, transgender activist and memoirist. Mellman created solo shows and formed the band The Julie Ruin with Kathleen Hanna as well as the influential pop-cabaret night Our Hit Parade. Eight years later, they’re back and the buzz is palpable, for international devotees of queer cabaret performance and for New York’s nightlife world, rising to a pitch for those in the foyer and the room on the first Saturday night of the run.

The reception is enthusiastic for Herb, his former white-powdered short back and sides now a white-powdered cascading ponytail, his suit shiny and dotted, his feet bare but for blue patterned socks. And it’s ecstatic for Kiki, who bursts into action as if she’s never left. Still present are the sequins fixed under her eyes like glamorous teardrops, the low-slung bosom and the big bow in her ash-blonde wig. A dress the colour, she notes, of “cooked shrimp” drips all over with threads that flail as she moves, suggesting a baby doll in freefall. They’re back, she says, ready “to finally expose ourselves in front of the millennials” – even if the crowd was mostly over 40.

Things have changed a bit while they’ve been away. They decided to lie low, Kiki reports, when Obama came to power on the promise of hope. “Nobody wants to see Kiki and Herb when they’ve got hope,” she drawls. “Well, it’s eight years later, and who’s got hope now?” Devotees will recognise a few lines and a couple of set-piece mash-ups here, including one that slides from Rent’s Seasons of Love to The Rainbow Connection to “the Nazi theme song” Tomorrow Belongs to Me. But this is no greatest-hits self-tribute act. As its title suggests, Seeking Asylum! is a show for 2016. An extended recap of the duo’s escapades over the past eight years roves across north Africa, the Middle East, southeast Asia and Europe, taking in Beat poets, Al Jazeera, a bevy of charming dictators and a medically induced coma or two, all couched within a weaving concatenation of Styx’s I’m Sailing Away and Radiohead’s Let Down.

There are musings on election season: recollections of a heady 60s summer with Bernie Sanders lead to a modest proposal regarding transphobic bathroom laws (just pee anywhere) and a blistering fusion of Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam and 1960 What? by Gregory Porter. Later, a long ‘Hillary soliloquy’ hails “the hardest working show pony this country has ever known” and relishes the thought of a Scorpio lesbian in the Oval Office.

For all the new work, the shtick (I use the term with love) remains the same. Character and performance are inextricable for Kiki and Herb. Kiki is as Kiki does, screeching, slurring and gargling her notes, peppering her delivery with scat breaks and ejaculations of “Ha! Ha! Ha!”, snatching at the air, dancing flappily, sliding shamelessly past forgotten lyrics and calling out for that next drink. Herb is like the shabby-deluxe limo driver, confidently installed at the ivory dashboard, keeping the show on the road with rolling, smartly modulated support for Kiki’s patter and driving, adventurous accompaniment for the songs. His emotions are blunter than Kiki’s, ranging from borderline-gormless pleasure to moans of devotion and bellowing pain.

In terms of musicality, both are deft and powerfully assured with an element of jeopardy. Herb’s playing occasionally threatens to veer onto the kerb. Kiki’s sandpaper-and-honey voice threatens to crack. But they don’t. If anything, the pair seems sturdier than ever, their hides toughened. The raw vulnerability that used to be exposed at some length is restricted to a glimmer of grief here, a pause of regret there. Instead, there’s a reinforced claim to their position at the heart of it all – to stay on the stage until they feel successful. “We’re not leaving,” Kiki deadpans. “We’re not giving up this ground.” Showbusiness as trench warfare, ladies and gentlemen.

Kiki’s unusual home life continues to evolve: she’s now got a gender-neutral autistic grandbaby called Opioid who’s sharp as a tack and shows a capacity to “wriggle and grunt” that presages a career in performance. Following a costume change into something that evokes Wonder Woman in a psychedelic boudoir – metallic blue bodice over crotch-starburst tie-dye chiffon pants – Kiki offers up a sultry, scathing lounge version of Stuck in the Middle that brings out the song’s sense of droll contempt and sheer exhaustion.

It’s part of a pattern of understated frustration at a culture of passive complaint. Power, Kiki seems to be suggesting, at least some power, is there to be taken if an effort is made. There’s a barb to snag the audience’s conscience. “Did any of you go hungry last night?” Kiki asks the crowd, many of whom paid three-figure sums for a ticket and perhaps forty bucks for the steak. “Cause my dinner was delicious.” Her demand is slurred but simple: don’t just kvetch, solve a problem. A bold synthesis of Elton John’s The King Must Die and Shakespeare’s Richard II shows us Kiki in her cups and a world ripe for change.

Having a character who forgets her words and loses her train of thought is a pretty bulletproof technique for loosey-goosey performance. Even so, there are moments, particularly early in the show, when Bond doesn’t seem one hundred percent on top of the material. Certainly nothing to derail the show, and nothing particularly remarkable at the start of a good-sized run, just an occasional sense that effort is going into remembering lines and therefore not available to nourish the connection with the audience. This connection remains at the heart of the Kiki and Herb project and is gloriously served across the night as a whole. There are the flirtations with front-row punters, the bits of business around bar staff’s slowness to refresh drinks, the prowling through the auditorium and, most of all, the satisfyingly conspiratorial sense of really settling in for the evening. And then there’s that encore.

As Kiki mounts the table and lurches towards my seat, Herb softens the tempo a touch. She wheels round to reprimand him. “I’m going in for the kill!” Within seconds, my head is clasped to her bosom and buzzing with Jarvis Cocker’s words, resonating from her body to mine through that blue bodice. “This is me on top of you and I can’t believe that it took me this long. This is the eye of the storm…” Kiki wriggles and grunts as she pushes my head down and arches herself over the counter, back into the room. Soon her legs are wrapped around my head, my face locked to her crotch and grinning a mile wide as she serenades the space, suspended in midair. “It’s what men in stained raincoats pay for but in here it is pure.” This is hardcore. This is Kiki and Herb on fire.

Kiki and Herb Seeking Asylum! is at Joe’s Pub until May 22 2016. Full details here. A short version of this review is published by Attitude magazine.