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You have a rare chance tonight and Saturday night to look into a theatrical petri dish whose contents, once nurtured in the stage lights of the Wilma Theater in Center City, will end up on Broadway.
Kiki & Herb - a drag act for which outrageous is a lame term - will open Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway in about two weeks, and they've been trying out material at the Wilma since Wednesday. There's no scenery, just a red curtain; no fancy lighting, no extracurricular razzmatazz. That stuff awaits their arrival at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway.
What you'll see here is a work in progress - but if it progresses much further, you'd better stow a girdle in your backpack when heading to Broadway, just to keep your sides from splitting.
Kiki (Justin Bond) and Herb (Kenny Mellman) have, for 17 years, been doing essentially the same lounge-act send-up with different songs and updated patter. Here's the drill, wildly successful for Bond and Mellman: Kiki's a singer in her 70s, by now closer to her 80s. She's not just self-indulgent, she's recklessly outre. As the night goes on, she swills booze onstage until she's performing, complete with bizarre commentary, in a hilarious stupor.
Herb, with his vacuous smile, is her pianist. His fingers alternately rivet the keyboard and accompany Kiki's increasingly depraved narratives with mood-setters that put Windham Hill's New Age artists to shame.
Nick Stuccio, who heads the Philly Live Arts/Fringe Festival, cites the act as an example of the way the artistic fringe seeps into the mainstream; a decade ago, he says, you could see Kiki & Herb free at the festival's nightly cabaret, which gets hot around midnight, after all the ticketed offerings are over. Later this month on Broadway - as far from fringe as possible - you'll pay up to about $100.
This is no overnight trajectory; Kiki & Herb have been playing the Kimmel Center, the Wilma (Pardon Our Appearance), Carnegie Hall (Kiki & Herb Will Die for You), London's Royal Albert Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and even the HMS President in the River Thames (Kiki & Herb Mount the President). And now this.
Until Wednesday night at 10:25, when the two ended their show with a knockout-funny encore about going to Broadway and a singular version of the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," I was a Kiki & Herb virgin. Like many a former virgin, I want more. I'd never seen the possibilities in an industrial-strength Dean Martin act, but then I never imagined that anyone could approach it from the edge of the intellectual planet.
"If it's the end of the world," a boozy Kiki demands, "why is everything so goddam expensive? Shouldn't everything be on sale by now?" She likes to think of herself as a light in the blackout, she says. She's more like an explosion.
She expounds on everything from Mel Gibson to cancer to her estranged daughter, and may be the only U.S. citizen able to dedicate a single song to both gays and Christians with a straight face (but blurred vision). She traces her family line to Jesus. She begins by interpreting the current infectious hit "Crazy" as if it were an eccentric dirge dedicated to her life, then goes on to belt songs by the Cure, the Wu-Tang Clan, Dan Fogelberg (a gorgeous take on "Same Old Lang Syne"), and others - sometimes for laughs, sometimes for real.
At least that's what I saw Wednesday. Who knows what you'll see tonight? Or how this will play on Broadway? I bet the show will probably come down 15 minutes, and the addition of stagecraft may usurp some of the intimacy Kiki & Herb has at the Wilma. I hope its heart, and its exceedingly strange mind, remains intact. I'll let you know in a couple of weeks.
Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway
Written and performed by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman.
Playing at the Wilma Theater, Broad and Spruce Streets, at 8 tonight and Saturday. Tickets: $35. Information: www.wilmatheater.org or 215-546-7824.
SOURCE: Philadelphia Inquirer
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