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Kiki & Herb Live at the Knitting Factory! DVD
Running Time: 94 minutes + 26 bonus minutes
Rating: NR
An Alive Mind Worldwide Release: January 15nd 2008

 

Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman are KIKI & HERB, worldwide smash punk rebel entertainers, cabaret outsiders, and subversive pop stars who rock stages from the Sydney Opera House to the West End with their iconoclastic and uproarious live act. Join the Tony-nominated duo at the epicenter of their madness for their first-ever live DVD from the Knitting Factory in New York City. Featuring 15 numbers from their incendiary Year of Magical Drinking Tour including Rhythm Divine, Song Against Sex, I'm Ugly (and I Don't Know Why), Moments of Pleasure, I was a Maoist Intellectual, and LilyBelle, KIKI & HERB Live at the Knitting Factory is the definitive document of the act that Ben Brantley of the NY Times hails as "mind-popping, transcendent, and wondrous, of devastating depth and substance."

-Special Features-

Not without my Napalm/ July 4, 1993
Kiki and Herb Live at The Fez/ August 26, 1999
Banging in the Nails/ July 7, 2005
The King Must Die/ DVD Outtake

dvdcover
Filmed at the Knitting Factory , NYC, May 17th 2007 Starring Kiki - Justin Bond Herb - Kenny Mellman Created and Written by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman Executive Producer Stephen Hendel Director Gérard Schmidt

 

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Kiki & Herb are asleep, please check back to see where they will wake up next! Or buy a dvd to help dull the withdrawl.

 

Kiki & Herb: ill Die For You at Carnegie Hall

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Kiki & Herb
Kiki & Herb Will Die For You at Carnegie Hall
© 2005 Die For You LLC (634479047046)

CD Baby Price: $20.00

IN STOCK. ORDER NOW. Will ship within 24 hours!
Radical Rock "One of the great artistic statements of our time. It isn't a concert recording; it's a movie for the mind. For energy, seriousness of purpose, hilarious insight, and sheer totally of-the-moment genius, easily the best CD of the year."
TRACKS

1 DISC ONE #1. Close to it All
2 #2. Note to Self: Don't Die/Flamingo/When Doves Cry #3. (mono
3 #4. Why #5. (monologue) Hoochie Coochie
4 #6. Sex Bomb #7. (monologue) Yasaweh
5 #8. Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You #9. (monologue)
6 #10. A Lover Spurned #11. (monologue) Bored, Bored, Bored
7 #12. The Windmills of My Mind
8 #13. I Was Meant for the Stage
9 #14. No Children
10 #15. Rainbow Connection


11 DISC TWO #1. Pina Colada Song
12 #2. Institutionalized #3. (monologue) Jazz
13 #4. The Paris Match #5. (monologue) I've got to go to Vietnam
14 #6. The Revolution Medley: The Revolution Will Not Be Televise
15 #7. Dominique #8. (monologue) Show Business Martyrs
16 #9. The Thin Ice
17 #10. Love Will Tear Us Apart
18 #11. Temptation
19 #12. Total Eclipse of the Heart
20 #13. Those Were the Days
21 #14. Tonight's the Kind of Night
22 #15. Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space
23 #16. Running Up That Hill
24 (this Is A Double Cd)

NOTES
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DOUBLE CD/Extra Long - Order Now for the Holidays

See "Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway" in NYC until September 10th, 2006!

Entertainment Weekly's Best CD Review of 2/18/05
"Come back soon, Kiki & Herb, we need you!"
******************************************
FlakMagazine Review 2/17/05

"The operative phrase on this two-disc, two-hour-plus recording of Kiki & Herb's Carnegie Hall engagement of last September issues like an assault during a roiling interpretation of Annie Lennox's "Why." Kiki DuRane, about to let fly a larynx-lacerating scat-shout of the song's chorus, warns the audience, "Don't get too comfortable!"

The audience applauds with vigor. They don't want to get comfortable. Many of them have come to share in the triumphant ascendance of Kiki & Herb, from engagements in San Francisco (when the show was in its nascent stages), to their id-driven evenings at the Flamingo East, P.S. 122 and Fez in downtown New York, to an off-Broadway engagement at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2003, and now, improbably, to their sold-out show at Carnegie Hall. And most of the audience knows that Kiki & Herb didn't score this gig because they make people feel comfortable.

... Kiki & Herb's Will Die for You features segments and full performances of at least 27 songs, all recast and deconstructed to fit the show's conceit. Kiki's singing voice, caramel with schmaltz in the low register and sandpapery and threatening when she lets loose a scream, will be a tough sell to some listeners, but it is immediate and vital. And Herb's piano work is phenomenal; he never ceases playing from the moment he hits the stage, and he manages to glide through the wildly various set list, from the grandiloquent "The Windmills of My Mind" to the plaintive "I Was Meant for the Stage" to the dance-hall rollicking "No Children" with admirable dexterity. Further, it is the bitter cocktail of anger, pain and the longing for grace, that allows Kiki & Herb to claim some songs as their own. Steve Nicks' "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You" and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" exist on these two discs in their definitive versions, and - shockingly - the duo's sensual, aching version of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" becomes a meditation on loneliness, the need for comfort and a plea for understanding and communion with intimates, textures that were only hinted at in Bush's new-wave version."

GayWired Review 2/17/05

"Anyone who can't get enough of Kiki and Herb onstage should buy this CD, a pink boa, an endless supply of pina coladas, a microphone, stage lighting... well, at least buy the CD. The rest can come later. And until then, you'll feel like Kiki and Herb themselves are both right there in front of you reeking of alcohol and desperation. Following their 2000 Christmas creation, Do You Hear What We Hear, this double-CD Carnegie Hall recording double-psychotic and double the fun."

Daily Variety Review of Concert 9/04

"One look at the crowd filing into "Kiki & Herb Will Die for You" made it clear this was not the usual Carnegie Hall set. In place of tuxes, pearls and shellacked hair were gleaming shaved heads and fauxhawks, tattoos and screaming fashion statements, drag queens and muscle boys. But the heavily partisan public should in no way detract from the accomplishment of downtown denizens Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman, who took possession of the hallowed uptown hall in an emotionally exhausting, career-capping show that will be talked about for months to come.

... As the evening wears on and Kiki's composure erodes, the decrepit diva's braying interpretations inch under the skin with their unsettling mix of self-reproach and fierce accusation. Especially memorable were Marc Almond's bitter "A Lover Spurned," a torn-up version of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart," a taxingly calisthenic take on Tom Jones' "Sex Bomb," Style Council's rueful "Paris Match" and the cheesy Bonnie Tyler hit "Total Eclipse of the Heart," performed as one of several encores, with brief detours into Pat Benatar, Yeats and Joni Mitchell. "

Kiki is Justin Bond, Herb is Kenny Mellman
CD Produced by Julian Fleisher
Executive Producers, Victoria Leacock and Stephen Hendel

PLEASE NOTE: On older equipment/car stereos Disc 2 may seem to 'skip' on the last two tracks, it is NOT the CD. 90 percent of equipment has no problem.

Opened and reviewed Sept. 19, 2004.
Running time: 2 HOURS, 57 MIN.
With: Sandra Bernhard, Michael Cavadias, Isaac Mizrahi, Jason Sellards, and Rufus Wainwright.

Kiki & Herb: Do You Hear What We Hear

Kiki & Herb: Do You Hear What We Hear?

Special guests include: Michael Cavadias, Debbie Harry, Isaac Mizrahi, Molly Ringwald, Rufus Wainwright and Alex Gifford

Produced by: Julian Fleisher


1. Opening Medley: Sleigh Ride/Make Yourself Comfortable/Creep/Dancing Queen/You Have Placed a Chill in my Heart/Oh Happy Day/We Wish You a Merry Christmas
2. Frosty the Snowman
3. Exit Music for a Film
4. Who's Child is This?: What Child is This?/Deep Inside/Crucify *featuring Debbie Harry
5. Fox in the Snow/Holiday: *featuring the Erie Institutional Choir
6. People Die: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer/Smells Like Teen Spirit/Suicide is Painless
7. Jazz Improv
8. Lilybelle/Blasphemous Rumours
9. The Big Time
10. Running Up That Hill
11. Those Were the Days: *featuring Michael Cavadias, Debbie Harry, Isaac Mizrahi, Molly Ringwald, and Rufus Wainwright
12. Tonight's the kind of Night: *featuring Alex Gifford

 

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Alive On Broadway - The New York Times : Ben Brantley (August 16, 2006)

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‘Kiki & Herb’: The Road to Catharsis With Those 2 Immortals nytimesSara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy BEN BRANTLEY
Published: August 16, 2006
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.
Justin Bond as Kiki croons her whiskey way through smoky ballads.
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.It is a tribute to the perverse showbiz genius of Kiki and Herb that once you twig on to this shameless trompe l’oeil, you don’t feel merely amused. Nor do you think that the singer has been trading only in paper-moon emotions, or making fun of those who do, as she croons her whiskey-pickled way through bathetic ballads and angry anthems.Those artificial tears are a comic grace note, sure, but they are also a totem for feelings of devastating depth and substance. And a performance that should, by rights, be just a night of imitative song and shtick from another pair of happy high-campers from the alternative club scene becomes irresistibly full-bodied art.Fakery is often more real than reality in the glamorous and tawdry world of theater. I should probably state, for the uninitiated, that the ultrawomanly Kiki is channeled by a man named Justin Bond. Herb is the alter ego of a truly inspired pop musicologist named Kenny Mellman.And while Kiki and Herb claim to be as old as the hills, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman are only in their 40’s and 30’s, respectively. The roadmaps of geriatric lines on their faces have been drawn with the blunt bogusness of children portraying grandparents in a school play. And by the way, Kiki and Herb now say the reason they didn’t die, as they had promised, after their farewell concert at Carnegie Hall in 2004 is that they can’t. The reasons are complicated, but let’s just say they involve their having been present at the birth of Jesus.Believe it or not, that makes sense. In their decade as one of downtown’s savviest acts, Kiki and Herb have always traded on the reassuring illusion of immortality conferred by deeply stylish cabaret performers of advanced age.You know, the kind you stumble upon after midnight, improbably drawing oxygen from smoky tunes and smoky rooms in bars found everywhere from the inns Ramada to the hotels Carlyle and Algonquin. When Kiki sings — and her numbers go from Eisenhower-era velvet (“Make Yourself Comfortable”) to punk-era tarpaper (the Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed”) — she suggests some wondrous hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Elaine Stritch, Patti Smith and Kitty Carlisle Hart. As with those very different women, the point is never the prettiness of the voice but the history behind it and the passion to endure that vibrates within.There is also the vibrato (real or metaphoric) of suffering, that public overdose of private pain that made Judy Garland a figure of such religious adoration. The references to Jesus in Kiki’s spiels aren’t inappropriate, since Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman appreciate the role of the self-lacerating performer who cathartically embodies the anguish of his audience. (“Kiki and Herb Will Die for You” is the title of their last CD, a recording of their Carnegie Hall concert.)Between songs, Kiki describes her early history with an uncaring mother and abusive father (“I always said if you weren’t molested as a child, you must have been an ugly kid”); her childhood in a Pennsylvania orphanage, where she met Herb, a gay Jewish foundling; the seesaw career of high and low living, institutionalizations and shifting musical fashions; and the death of her little daughter, Coco, which Kiki describes while staring into the murky depths of her glass of Canadian Club.Famous names are tossed into the swirling mix. Kiki danced in burlesque nightclubs with Maya Angelou; she and Herb were supposed to have performed the theme song for Mel Gibson’s Holocaust series on television until his arrest for drunk driving put an end to the project; world leaders (you can imagine which ones) are gutted, roasted and fried.This sounds like regulation tacky countercultural standup, laced with the overemotional kitsch that drag queens borrow from old movies, right? That sensibility is certainly evoked by Scott Pask’s set — a bizarre sylvan landscape that suggests Salvador Dalí working in Las Vegas and includes a blasted tree that Kiki perches on to sing (and drink) — and Marc Happel’s Loretta Young-meets-Cher costumes.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”?If the idea of the end of the world keeps creeping into the show, that’s appropriate to these times, isn’t it? But Kiki and Herb have been around long enough to know that the threat of doomsday is old news and that life — dammit all — goes on.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.KIKI & HERB
Alive on BroadwayCreated and executed by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman; sets by Scott Pask; lighting by Jeff Croiter; costumes by Marc Happel; sound by Brett Jarvis; general manager, Foster Entertainment; production management, Aurora Productions; production stage manager, Peter Hanson. Presented by David J. Foster, Jared Geller, Ruth Hendel, Jonathan Reinis Inc., Billy Zavelson, Jamie Cesa, Anne Strickland Squadron and Jennifer Manocherian in association with Gary Allen and Melvin Honowitz. At the Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, Manhattan; (212) 239-6200. Through Sept. 10. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.WITH: Justin Bond (Kiki) and Kenny Mellman (Herb).http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/08/16/theater/reviews/16kiki.html

Profile: The New Yorker - Alex Ross (May 19, 2003)

Grand Illusions
Down memory lane with Kiki and Herb.
by Alex Ross May 19, 2003

"Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théâtre"
Cherry Lane Theatre;
University of California at Berkeley
It is said of many show-business legends tha they lose touch with the ordinary world an become cartoons of their former selves. Th opulently dissipated Kiki DuRane—a sixty-something lounge singer who tours ad nausea with a doleful accompanist named Herb—ha gone in the opposite direction; she is a fictiona creation who has acquired the grit and the glow o the real. Kiki and Herb are the invention of th writer-performer Justin Bond and the pianis Kenny Mellman, who have long been fixtures a downtown New York venues like Flamingo East P.S. 122, and Fez. They have refined their ac into an Off Broadway show, “Kiki & Herb: Cou de Théâtre,” which recently opened at the Cherr Lane. It is a slashingly funny, psychicall unsettling entertainment—part cabaret, part roc and roll, part Victorian melodrama—to which th category of camp does not apply. Camp implie knowingness and detachment; Bond’s Kiki is anarchic and atavistic, in the grip o forces beyond her control. She is almost militant in her decrepitude. Reminiscin airily about her old friend Grace Kelly, barking obscenely at childhood foes drifting into a sullen stupor, snapping back to life with yawps of vicious glee Kiki is a beacon of insanity in a world that may finally be coming around to he point of view
The conceit of the show is that Kiki, a self-described “boozy chanteusie,” is aiming to attract new listeners by singing contemporary hits. “It is both thrilling and humbling that so many young people have, as it were, ‘tuned in to our sound,’ ” she says, with the overenunciation of the early-evening alcoholic. Thus begins a scorched-earth advance across decades of pop music, from Bob Merrill’s “Make Yourself Comfortable” to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Kiki’s wild stabs at modern trends recall such classic miscalculations as Mae West’s renditions of Beatles songs and Ethel Merman’s disco album, but the genius of Kiki is that her entire career seems to consist of bungled crossover projects: a bossa-nova album (“Kiki and Herb: Don’t Blame It on Kiki and Herb,” 1964); a spoken-word record (“Kiki and Herb: Whitey on the Moon,” 1972); a belated disco effort (“Kiki and Herb: One Last Chance to Blow,” 1983). The songstress hurls herself at this material with such dire enthusiasm that she takes full possession of it. Lately, she has taken an interest in rap, which she calls “the folk music of today.” In past shows, she has sung Wu-Tang Clan and Snoop Doggy Dogg, adding jazz vocalise to such lyrics as “All my niggaz and my bitches / Throw your motherfuckin’ hands in the air!” This time, she takes on Eminem, whose self-pitying hysteria suits her beautifully.
Between the songs come autobiographical vignettes. Bond has mapped out the life of Kiki in loving detail, and each show adds a few new twists to the familiar downward spiral. The singer was born during the Great Depression, overshadowed by tragedy from the start. “A lot of people jumped out of windows when the stock market collapsed in 1929,” she recalls, “but not all of them died. My father was such a man.” She was given the diagnosis of “retard” and placed in a children’s institution in western Pennsylvania. There she met Herb, a foundling of indeterminate origin. When Herb fell victim to a predatory delinquent named Danny, Kiki was there to comfort him, and a great friendship was born. (The Danny episode inspires one of the show’s set pieces, a dramatic monologue built around the song “I’m Ugly and I Don’t Know Why,” by an obscure band called Butt Trumpet, with adornments from the inspirational Christian poem “Footprints.”) The duo’s musical career developed only in fits and starts. There was a prolonged interruption when Kiki had to serve a jail sentence for the attempted murder of her first husband, an abusive boxer named Ruby. “I wasn’t trying to kill him,” Kiki explains, “only trying to get his attention.”

Throughout the evening, the chanteuse looks back wistfully to the year 1967, when her life turned momentarily grand. A flashback sequence re-creates the scene: Kiki and Herb are playing at the Grand Casino, in Monte Carlo, at the invitation of Princess Grace. They are making what should have been their triumphant comeback album, “Kiki and Herb: It’s Not Unusual.” Kiki has Aristotle Onassis as a lover, Maria Callas as a rival. Fortune has raised her up, but now a terrible tragedy lays her low. During a Mediterranean cruise, she leaves her seven-year-old daughter, Coco, alone on deck while she goes below to satisfy her carnal needs. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she says, head cast down, “where the hell can a kid go on the deck of a boat?” At this juncture, the performance begins to waver between black comedy and something like genuine pathos. Kiki’s failures as a singer pale next to her failures as a mother. The watery death of Coco haunts her. She has lost touch with her two other children, who claim not to know her, even though she sends them all her press clippings. She takes refuge in another glass of Canadian Club and ginger ale—the piano is equipped with a drink holder—and the drink begins to take its toll. She digresses, and digresses again—“Where was I, ladeezh n genlmn?”—and then stops, staring fixedly at nothing.
Just when it seems that the comic spirit of the evening has been swallowed up in melancholy, the original, rampaging Kiki returns, her extreme jazz vocals now fuelled by rage at herself and the world. She turns for solace to her fans, who have always stood by her side, albeit in dwindling numbers. What the world needs, she says, is more love, for “without love . . . there is only rape.” “"Kiki & Herb” is a comedy, at least on the surface, but the performers a e serious people who have managed to smuggle into their act a fair degr e of theatrical and musical sophistication. Bond, who is forty, is a native of Hagers-town, Maryland. He studied classical acting in London, but he developed a distaste for that aspect of theatre which involved working with directors. e moved to San Francisco in 1988 and threw himself into street theatre, avant-gar e noise, and conceptual cabaret. One night, while trying to think of an innovati e birthday present for a friend, he drew age marks on his face and assumed the Ki i persona. He is resigned to being labelled a “drag queen,” although, after meeti g him offstage, you want to find a mellower label for his particular brand of gend r vagueness. Bond is simply a svelte person who looks stylish in women’s clothe , especially swinging-sixties outfits, like the ones that Faye Dunaway wore in “T e Thomas Crown Affair
Mellman, who is thirty-four, has the innocent face, diffident air, and slightly bewildered expression of someone who has spent long hours at the piano since childhood. He studied composition at the University of California at Berkeley, but became disenchanted with the music department when he was told that Erik Satie’s seldom heard “Socrate” was too boring to warrant a performance. He switched to San Francisco State to study poetry, and sought a new medium for his musical curiosity. He found it when he met Bond, and began accompanying the singer in such hard-to-reconstruct night-club evenings as “Dixie McCall’s Patterns for Living.” Kiki barged to the forefront one night in 1993, when, at the end of a Gay Pride weekend, Bond and Mellman felt too exhausted to do their usual program. “You’re Herb, I’m Kiki,” Bond said, before they went onstage, and a fading star was born.
The early Kiki and Herb shows were more chaotic than the one now running at the Cherry Lane. They were fuelled by the energy and rage of aids activism—the in-your-face tactics of act up and Queer Nation. Bond and Mellman used to heighten the naturalism of the show by getting exactly as drunk onstage as the scenario demanded. When I first saw them, five years ago, Kiki would climb on top of café tables and order the customers to lick her legs. If you tried to move your drink out of the way, she might grab it out of your hand. Another night, she threw a tray of steak knives, fortunately causing no harm. When Bond was asked to perform at Madonna’s birthday party, he got into a scuffle with the R. & B. artist D’Angelo. Kiki and Herb emerged as much from the spit-spewing, scenery-chewing mentality of punk rock as from the cabaret tradition. It’s not much of a contradiction, when you consider how many of the original New York punk rockers came out of the avant-garde art scene, the gay underground, and other bohemias.

In the end, “Kiki & Herb” is a more political show than its premise suggests. We should really have expected no less from a woman who alleges to have been engaged to the radical black Presidential candidate Dick Gregory. The politics emerges not just in Kiki’s commentary on current affairs—summing up George W. Bush’s approach to homeland security, she advises, “Whatever you do, don’t go out and don’t stay in”—but also in her obsession with the figure of the abandoned, abused, or socially outcast child. The stories return relentlessly to this theme—a young gay boy raped by his classmates, a girl cast aside by her mother and placed in an institution. Of course, whenever Kiki is beginning to break your heart with these tales, she has to blurt out something stunningly grotesque. “If you weren’t abused as a child,” she declares, “you must have been an ugly kid.” The unshockable downtown crowd never fails to gasp at that one.
Only an academic paper in gender studies could do justice to the complexitie of Kikiness. (In fact, an N.Y.U. graduate student has written a thesis on th subject.) The show also makes interesting points about music—about how song are sung and about what they mean. This is where poor Herb comes to the fore Kenny Mellman’s job is to make sense on the piano of his partner’s bizarr repertoire, and those who feel that modern pop songs have too much technolog and too little music will enjoy his Luddite solutions. Rachmaninovian bass octave give symphonic majesty to a song like Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film).” T mimic the saturated textures of hip-hop production, he attacks the instrument in dissonant, Cecil Taylor frenzy, substituting cluster chords for synthetic beats. H gets a huge, bellowing sound out of the piano. Herb, as Kiki portrays him, is damaged child seeking refuge in music, and the piano is the vehicle of hi revenge
The high points of the show are the medleys, which are carefully constructed simulations of music losing its mind. One song morphs into the next before you really notice what’s going on. In Kiki and Herb’s beloved Christmas medleys, “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” becomes the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin”; “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” becomes Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The tour de force in the current show begins with “Whitey’s on the Moon,” Gil Scott-Heron’s protest song about moon landings and racial injustice. After a minute or two, Scott-Heron’s spoken-word anthem has mutated into latter-day rap—Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” with its inspiring chorus, “You better lose yourself in the music, the moment / you own it, you better never let it go.” A second later, Kiki shrieks, “And you may ask yourself, ‘What is that beautiful house?,’ ’’ and we are in the middle of the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” The transitions are seamless because Mellman translates all the songs into his own peculiar musical voice, which might be described as John Cage cocktail lounge.When I asked Mellman about the Eminem medley, he said that he had spent a weekend working on it and that the theme of it was appropriation. Kiki singing Eminem is ridiculous; but no less ridiculous than Eminem, a white kid, mimicking black culture, or the Talking Heads incorporating African beats into their SoHo art rock. Every singer, even Gil Scott-Heron, is pretending in one way or another—putting on drag—and Kiki does the service of bulldozing all the façades of authenticity. There’s something liberating about the way the songs break free of categories and come together in a midnight carnival. The music becomes as androgynous as the performer: it is always changing shape and identity. This is probably why fellow-musicians find Kiki and Herb so riveting. Everyone from Lou Reed to the Pet Shop Boys has attended their shows. Among the rock memorabilia that Bond has accumulated is Edie Sedgwick’s leopard-skin pillbox hat; he wears it while singing Bob Dylan’s “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat.”
Bond and Mellman are in the curious position of being celebrities’ celebrities—famous to the famous but little known outside the downtown scene. For years, they have contemplated taking their act out of lounges and into legitimate theatres; with some trepidation, they are now doing it. If they find wider fame, it will be richly deserved, but their longtime fans don’t want them to wander too far from their punk-drag roots, when they scared the daylights out of unsuspecting customers. Once, during a show in San Francisco, Bond went to an open window and began shouting to people on the street outside: “Just don’t get too comfortable out there!” ♦http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/19/030519crth_theatre2

Coup De Theatre - General

THE NEW YORK TIMES
MAY 19, 2003
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER

Life Is a Drag, Old Chum,
But They Rise Above All That
`Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre' Cherry Lane Theatre

An expectant, whooping, knowing, ululating crowd greeted
Kiki & Herb when the lights went up on their new show.

For those who have never made their acquaintance, Kiki & Herb
are actually Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman. Mr. Bond is Kiki, the
one with the great legs in the net stockings, the fringed dress,
the blond wig, the hair ribbon. Mr. Mellman is Herb. He's at the
piano, just in front of the neon lights that spell out her name in
pink and his in blue on the intimate stage that suggests a black
boite of a cabaret.

The conceit of their skillful, intermissionless performance of
song and story in "Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre" is that they
are a veteran show business duo. With Kiki doing most of the
singing, camping, vamping and reminiscing and the highly
talented and always supportive but self-effacing Herb playing
a ceaselessly propulsive piano, they revisit a gloriously
checkered life and career.

Shows of this sort may not be everyone's C-cup of tease,
but from start to finish "Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre,"
created by Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman and directed by
Scott Elliott, lives up to its title in a performance that wittily
comments on a style of entertainment even as it absolutely
revels in it. Ten minutes could be pared from the roughly
100 minute length without giving "Coup de Theatre" grounds
for a claim of critical abuse, but whatever the show's length,
Kiki remains a captivating combination-of caricature and
chanteuse as she sings and tells and tipples her way through a
survivor's tale worthy of Dickens in an age of rant, rock and rap.

In an intelligently calibrated performance that runs an emotional gamut from searing heartache to purblind vainglory,
Kiki, looking back to the duo's heyday in Monaco in 1967 and to the pair's meeting as "retards" in what she calls an
"institutional," dispenses hard-earned wisdom and tortured biography. Letting facts and political correctness fall where
they may, she limns a friend's compassion, a mother’s pain; she drops names, puts down Herb, picks up his spirits and
comments on news and politics. Ranging across the decades, all the storytelling is mixed with songs and snippets by
everyone and everything from Styx and Bob Merrill to Radiohead, Eminem, the Bee Gees, Meat Loaf and "Rent."

So here, as in past productions, is the saga of Kiki's abandonment by her mother; Herb as a gay Jewish foundling;
brutal life in the institutional; the rape of Herb; Kiki's discovery of her womanly powers; her lover the boxer; her dead
child; the children who abandoned her; and enough more self-absorption and self-exposure to fill a week of
confessional television.

Times may have been tough, but Kiki has come through. Even if the smile on her face sometimes wavers and a tear
gleams in her eye, she and Herb are always there for each other.

Taken on its own niched terms, "Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre" gleams like a rhinestone.

NEW YORK POST
MAY 23, 2003

Two Troubadours True
By BRIAN SCOTT LIPTON

KIKI, the 70-year-old lounge singer and ultimate survivor - the
alter ego of the brilliant Justin Bond - has been on the New York
club scene for nearly a decade, accom-panied by her
"gay Jewish retard" pianist, Herb (Kenny Mellman).

The dynamic duo has now graduated to the legitimate stage -
specifically, the Cherry Lane Theatre - in the often hilarious
and sometimes touching "Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre."

In this 90-minute gaband songfest, well directed by Scott Elliott
("The Women"), the still-glamorous Kiki recounts the details of
her tragicomic fictional life, from her childhood days with Herb
in the "institutional" to her friendship with Princess Grace,
the death of her 7-year-old daughter, Coco, and her
estrangement from her surviving daughter, Miss D.

What makes this act so unusual is that Kiki and Herb comment
on these stories, and society in general, through remarkably
idiosyncratic renditions of songs by such diverse writers and
performers as Bob Merrill, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd, Suede,
Eminem and Radiohead. Indeed, Kiki's rendition of
Gil Scott-Heron's poem, "Whitey's on the Moon," is
worth the price of admission.

Fans of the pair - and there are many – may find "Coup de
Theatre" a little less raw than their previous shows at Fez
or Westbeth. (Kiki even stays sober this time out.)

But there's still plenty of audience interaction (first-rowers,
beware), plus an all-new "flashback" sequence not to be missed,
set in Monaco in 1967.

Mouths will drop open at the unbelievably funny, decidedly non-p.c.
comments that spew forth from Kiki's unpredictable lips. Lucky for her,
the dead can't sue!

 

 

 

Jersey Katz proposes to Keith Okada at Kiki & Herb

crazy

 

 

 

 

flamingojackiepin

 

 


2 out of 3 Ain't Bad -- Meatloaf
7 or in 10 -- Geraldine Fibbers

A Lover Spurned -- Marc Almond
Actress -- Melanie
All That Jazz -- "Chicago"

Bar Italia -- Pulp
Barracuda -- Heart
Beauty Regime -- Divine Comedy
Big Time -- Suede
Butch -- Geraldine Fibbers

Charlotte Rampling -- Bambi Lake
Cherish -- Association
Cold -- Annie Lennox
Come Sail Away -- Styx
Common People -- Pulp
Creep -- Radiohead
Crucify -- Tori Amos

Crucifying Jesus -- Tigerlillies
Cry No More -- Poison Girls

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Dancing Queen -- Abba
Deep Inside -- Mary J Blige
Dominique -- The Singing Nun

Exit Music For A Film -- Radiohead

Fire And Ice -- Pat Benatar
Fox In The Snow -- Belle and Sebastein
Fuck The Pain Away -- Peaches

Get and Stay Famous -- Momus

Has Anyone Ever Written Anything For You? -- Stevie Nicks
Heroin -- Velvet Underground
Holiday -- BeeGees

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I Was Made For Loving You -- Kiss
I Would Do Anything For Love -- Meatloaf
If -- Divine Comedy
If You Were Born Today -- Low
I'm On Fire -- Bruce Springsteen
I'm Ugly (And I Don't Know Why) -- Butt Trumpet
Institutionalized -- Suicidal Tendencies

Johnny Mathis' Feet -- American Music Club

Keep On Loving You -- REO Speedwagon

Lay Down (Candles In The Rain) -- Melanie
Lazy Afternoon -- John Latouche
Like a Snowman -- Stephin Merritt
Lillybelle -- Geraldine Fibbers
Linger -- Cranberries
Life in a Glass House -- Radiohead
Loveboat Theme -- Paul Williams

Make Yourself Comfortable -- Bob Merrill
Maoist Intellectual -- Momus
Miss World -- Hole
My One and Only Love -- Guy Wood and Robert Mellin

No Surprises -- Radiohead
Normal -- Tigerlillies

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Oh Happy Day -- Edwin Hawkins Singers
Old Age -- Hole
Open Arms -- Journey

Pantomime Horse -- Suede
Paranoid -- Black Sabbath
Pina Colada Song -- Rupert Holmes
Prisoner -- Barbra Streisand
Purple Rain -- Prince
Putting Out Fire (With Gasoline) -- David Bowie

Rainbow Connection -- The Muppet Movie
Rid Of Me -- PJ Harvey
Running Up That Hill -- Kate Bush

Seasons of Love -- "Rent"
Smells Like Teen Spirit -- Nirvana
Stairway To Heaven -- Led Zeppelin
Surrender -- Cheap Trick

The Fear -- Pulp
The King Must Die -- Elton John
Thin Ice -- Pink Floyd
This is Hardcore -- Pulp
This Woman's Work -- Kate Bush
Those Were The Days -- Mary Hopkin
Times Square -- Marianne Faithfull
Tonight's The Kind of Night -- Melanie
Total Eclipse Of The Heart -- Jim Steinman
Tubthumping -- Chumbawumba

Untouchable -- Rialto

Walking The Cow -- Daniel Johnston
We Are Floating In Space -- Spiritualized
When Doves Cry -- Prince
Whitey's On The Moon -- Gil-Scott Heron
Who By Fire? -- Leonard Cohen
Why -- Annie Lennox
Windmills of My Mind -- Michel Legrand
Wish You Were Here -- Pink Floyd
Without You -- Nillson

You Placed a Chill In My Heart -- Eurythmics