The Politics Of Cabaret
Curt Schleier - Special To The Jewish Week
‘One of our producers was in the lobby a couple of nights ago and he overheard this couple in their 70s,” Kenny Mellman said during a recent telephone interview. “They were walking towards the bathroom and the woman says to her husband, ‘I like this play. But I think that’s a man.’”
It turns out that she was right - on both counts. The show she was attending, “Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway,” now playing at the Helen Hayes Theater, is enjoyable. In fact, it just garnered raves from The New York Times. And, yes, that is a man in women’s eveningwear.
For the uninitiated, Kiki & Herb are a faux lounge act. Kiki (Justin Bond) is a septuagenarian singer, who, from certain angles resembles an older Kathleen Turner. Herb (Mellman) is her long-time and extremely loyal pianist. Kiki explains that the two met in a foundling “institutional,” where they were both diagnosed as retarded. Herb had two additional burdens to bear - he being gay and Jewish. And as Kiki points out a couple of times during the show, back in the 1930s when they met as children, “it wasn’t easy being Jewish.”
The play is fictional autobiography with Kiki recounting the duo’s history: “In the ‘50s I was a lounge singer. In the’60s we were a lounge act and in the ‘70s I went through my disco phase.”
It is part satire and part political screed. For example, at one point Kiki mentions it was recently President Bush’s birthday and that he’s a cancer - leaving it up to his listeners to decide if he was talking astrologically.
But while the show is frequently outrageous, it’s never over the top. It’s not gay-centric and could just as easily have been performed if Kiki were wearing a tuxedo.
“I think a lot of people are [surprised],” Mellman said. “I think that’s why some people are afraid to see us. I would hope it’s an intelligently written show everyone gets. We just use these characters to get [our message] across. The characters allow us to say things and get away with things we think are important.
“In our minds, we’re just a cabaret act like it is supposed to be - or at least was in the golden age of cabaret when you could express political thoughts.”
Mellman sees something of his Jewish background in his work: “I would say that the political character of our work on Kiki and Herb is, for me, a condition of having grown up in a liberal Jewish household. I’ve always been fascinated by a religion that allows so much commentary and debate within the confines of the religion itself, made visual in how the Talmud is laid out. This questioning is very present in my work.
“As for the music, I think the link to Jewish music is the melancholia behind the joy, and vice versa, that is entirely present in Israeli folk songs and klezmer melodies.”
Mellman, 37, was brought up in the San Fernando Valley. His mother taught special education and his father worked for the Jewish federation. “We went to a Reform synagogue. Funny you bring it up, but my parents were just cleaning out the house and found an audio tape of my bar mitzvah.”
Mellman knew he was gay early on, but didn’t come out until he was 18 or 19. “I went to an all-boys high school, and that wasn’t the place to flaunt that,” he says.
Mellman met Bond through a mutual friend. Bond wanted to do a cabaret show and the friend told him “I have a great piano player for you.”
They got together and realized they share “the same politics and same sense of humor.” At first, the two were more traditional, playing covers of rock and roll hits before assuming the Kiki & Herb personas. The act caught on and Mellman notes there were years they did as many as 290 shows - “and none in Broadway houses.”
But it wasn’t all tiny intimate settings. They’ve filled the Royal Albert Hall in London and Carnegie Hall in New York and had several runs Off Broadway. Audience reaction in different locals is interesting.
In London, where Mellman says, there’s a long tradition of drag performances, their shows are accepted with aplomb. With straight audiences unfamiliar with their work, he notices a pause: “Hey, there’s a man in a dress - what do I think of that. A gay audience has seen men in dresses; they just want to know what are we gonna do."