GRAND ILLUSIONS.('Kiki & Herb: Coup de Theatre,' Cherry Lane, New York, New York)(Theater Review)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-MAY-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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 Th??tre,"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...

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