Live after death

Photo: Joe Oppedisano

When Kiki and Herb announced their 2004 farewell concert at Carnegie Hall, titled Kiki & Herb Will Die for You, rumor had it that the demented punk-cabaret duo—the septuagenarian alter egos of Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman—would once and for all expire onstage. Quite the contrary: Kiki and Herb didn’t die at Carnegie Hall; they killed. The event was a triumph, the audience electric with excitement.

But Bond subsequently moved to London, and though they have since performed together around the world (as well as in select local shows, under the alias of the Eerie Institutional Children’s Choir), the pair’s Great White Way debut this month—the all-new Kiki & Herb Alive on Broadway—is their first major New York gig in nearly two years. “It’s a bit of a paradox, because Kiki and Herb are supposed to be these show-business losers who have no talent and never made it,” Bond explains. “So they’re dealing with the fact that all of a sudden they are for some strange reason on Broadway, 50 years after they thought they would be.”

Bond, 43, plays the seedy, needy, ferociously outspoken singer Kiki; Mellman, 37, plays her aged and confused longtime pianist, Herb. Onstage—though not in photographs—their faces are slashed with thick, expressionist wrinkles that defy any pretense of naturalism. (“We are more real because we aren’t trying to be real,” Bond says.) And it will be interesting to see if Broadway, which will soon have four Disney shows running simultaneously, proves a welcoming street for this piece of unapologetically political performance art, soaked in an unstable bath of anger, irony and sheer showbiz joy.

Kiki and Herb have come a long way since emerging out of the San Francisco club scene in 1992. Kiki was born first, at a gay party where Bond had been hired to perform. “I was in a really bitter mood and got stoned and started drawing lines on my face,” he says. “I was like, If these fags want a bitter bitchy queen, I’ll give them a bitter bitchy queen.” Mellman was later cajoled into creating Herb when the duo was performing at a straight bar on Gay Pride Day. “I can still picture us sitting in that booth, getting high on mushrooms and whiskey, and the next thing you know we’re onstage as these characters,” Mellman recalls. “It was a pleasure not to have to worry about looking good ever again.” (“I feel more attractive as Herb than myself,” he adds with a laugh.)

Drawing inspiration from the synthesis of two unlikely bookshelf-mates—Greil Marcus’s intellectual-punk treatise Lipstick Traces and James Gavin’s cabaret-history chronicle Intimate Nights—Bond and Mellman began developing a unique extreme-lounge aesthetic. “We trained each other over many years,” Mellman says. “I’d play piano really hard and bleed on keys, and he’d be screaming. It was like a race: We pushed each other to this point, and that’s where Kiki and Herb live—in this extremity.”

And although there is a deep vein of humor in their retro arrangements of such contemporary tunes as “When Doves Cry” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the duo often opens surprising windows of insight into those songs. “In a sense, we’re making fun of the older show-business people who tried to do contemporary music to make themselves relevant,” Bond observes. “But we get to play both sides, because we are doing songs of our generation, so it is authentic for us. This is music that we like, and that speaks to our peers; we’re not faking it, we’re just adding this passion of razzle-dazzle.”

While Bond and Mellman aspire to entertain—“It’s like a pep rally for smarties,” Bond says. “We’re hopefully gonna go, ‘Whee! Raise the roof!’ and get everyone excited by the end”—their show will also feature political content far more pointed than the usual Broadway pabulum, on such subjects as religion and gay marriage. “The more scared this country becomes, the more passive liberals are, because they can allow these conservatives to do their dirty work and still feel good about themselves for being selfish cunts,” maintains Bond, who identifies himself as transgender. “The show is important for my political agenda of queer visibility, which is a bit more radical than what you see on television.” For Mellman, the show presents a rare opportunity to bring a subversive message to a larger audience. “I’m sure that a lot of people reduce it to, ‘Why is this lounge show on Broadway?’” he notes. “But at least from my own viewpoint, it’s so much more than that. It belongs there.”

Which is not to say that Kiki and Herb plan to give up performing in the kind of dives that spawned them 14 years ago. “Fact of the matter is, we prefer it!” Bond says. “I’m excited to play Broadway, but I prefer to play some drunken shithole where everyone’s smoking.”

Kiki & Herb Alive on Broadway is at the Helen Hayes Theatre Friday 11–September 10. See Theater, Broadway.