It is said of many show-business legends that they lose touch with the ordinary world and become cartoons of their former selves. The opulently dissipated Kiki DuRane—a sixty-something lounge singer who tours ad nauseam with a doleful accompanist named Herb—has gone in the opposite direction; she is a fictional creation who has acquired the grit and the glow of the real. Kiki and Herb are the invention of the writer-performer Justin Bond and the pianist Kenny Mellman, who have long been fixtures at downtown New York venues like Flamingo East, P.S. 122, and Fez. They have refined their act into an Off Broadway show, “Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théâtre,” which recently opened at the Cherry Lane. It is a slashingly funny, psychically unsettling entertainment—part cabaret, part rock and roll, part Victorian melodrama—to which the category of camp does not apply. Camp implies knowingness and detachment; Bond’s Kiki is anarchic and atavistic, in the grip of forces beyond her control. She is almost militant in her decrepitude. Reminiscing 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 her 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 are serious people who have managed to smuggle into their act a fair degree 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. He moved to San Francisco in 1988 and threw himself into street theatre, avant-garde noise, and conceptual cabaret. One night, while trying to think of an innovative birthday present for a friend, he drew age marks on his face and assumed the Kiki persona. He is resigned to being labelled a “drag queen,” although, after meeting him offstage, you want to find a mellower label for his particular brand of gender vagueness. Bond is simply a svelte person who looks stylish in women’s clothes, especially swinging-sixties outfits, like the ones that Faye Dunaway wore in “The 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 complexities of Kikiness. (In fact, an N.Y.U. graduate student has written a thesis on the subject.) The show also makes interesting points about music—about how songs 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 bizarre repertoire, and those who feel that modern pop songs have too much technology and too little music will enjoy his Luddite solutions. Rachmaninovian bass octaves give symphonic majesty to a song like Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film).” To mimic the saturated textures of hip-hop production, he attacks the instrument in a dissonant, Cecil Taylor frenzy, substituting cluster chords for synthetic beats. He gets a huge, bellowing sound out of the piano. Herb, as Kiki portrays him, is a damaged child seeking refuge in music, and the piano is the vehicle of his 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!” ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 19, 2003, issue.

It is said of many show-business legends that they lose touch with the ordinary world and become cartoons of their former selves. The opulently dissipated Kiki DuRane—a sixty-something lounge singer who tours ad nauseam with a doleful accompanist named Herb—has gone in the opposite direction; she is a fictional creation who has acquired the grit and the glow of the real. Kiki and Herb are the invention of the writer-performer Justin Bond and the pianist Kenny Mellman, who have long been fixtures at downtown New York venues like Flamingo East, P.S. 122, and Fez. They have refined their act into an Off Broadway show, “Kiki & Herb: Coup de Théâtre,” which recently opened at the Cherry Lane. It is a slashingly funny, psychically unsettling entertainment—part cabaret, part rock and roll, part Victorian melodrama—to which the category of camp does not apply. Camp implies knowingness and detachment; Bond’s Kiki is anarchic and atavistic, in the grip of forces beyond her control. She is almost militant in her decrepitude. Reminiscing 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 her 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 are serious people who have managed to smuggle into their act a fair degree 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. He moved to San Francisco in 1988 and threw himself into street theatre, avant-garde noise, and conceptual cabaret. One night, while trying to think of an innovative birthday present for a friend, he drew age marks on his face and assumed the Kiki persona. He is resigned to being labelled a “drag queen,” although, after meeting him offstage, you want to find a mellower label for his particular brand of gender vagueness. Bond is simply a svelte person who looks stylish in women’s clothes, especially swinging-sixties outfits, like the ones that Faye Dunaway wore in “The Thomas Crown Affair.”