EDGE Provincetown

When Kiki and Herb were performing their show - Kiki & Herb : Alive on Broadway - last season in New York, one of the producers overheard a couple in the lobby. "They were standing in line at the bathroom," explained actor Justin Bond recently, "and the woman says to her husband," ’I like this show. But I think that’s a man.’"

Bond starts to laugh at this, as if in wonder of the absurdity of it all. Who would have thought that this faux lounge act that he created with Kenny Mellman some fifteen years ago would have found its way to Broadway entertaining hardcore fans and tourists alike? It was even nominated for a Tony Award this past year for Special Entertainment - an apt description if there ever was one, which led to the moment when the pair was seen on national television, with Kiki looking very kittenish and elegant from their orchestra seat at Radio City Music Hall. (Unfortunately they never made it to the podium - they lost. Perhaps CBS nixed it - who knows what Kiki might have said in her acceptance speech.)

Such are the ups and downs of show business, which is something that these fictional actors are quite accustomed. Kiki and Herb are, in actuality, the comic invention of New Yorkers Bond and Mellman - Bond plays Kiki DuRane and Mellman plays her accompanist, simply known as Herb. They impersonate a pair of show business dinosaurs - Kiki, the hard-drinking chanteuse with a basso voice that sounds as if she’s smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for decades; and Herb, her gay, wisecracking piano man and confidante. They embody their characters with such assurance and loving style that they seem, well, real. It helps that they’ve created a back-story that recycles every show business cliché in ways that make them seem funny again.

They are far from your typical drag fare - in fact behind the wigs and make-up is a biting, often bitter portrait of a survivor who is more likely to sing indie rock songs than Gershwin, and rant about politics. This, though, shouldn’t be surprising because the genesis of the act comes from when Bond and Mellman were living in San Francisco in the early 1980s during the height of the AIDS epidemic. They met through a casual friend and spent an afternoon singing show tunes. Not long after, they were performing around town. "I came up with the idea of a lounge singer," Bond recalls, "but she didn’t sing just jazz, but covers of indie rock songs."

She became Kiki, the boozy, elderly singer who would entertain audiences by exposing her mastectomy scars; and Mellman became Herb, a character inspired by a real-life musician they came across at an early gig. "The character of Herb was based on this Hawaiian piano player who played in this crazy, mob-owned Greek restaurant where we did our first show - Eddie Hawaiian. He would play the piano and drink and cry. He was so great," Mellman said.

The concept of Kiki stemmed from a number of sources. "My friend Nancy’s mother was a woman I met when I was 21 who had cancer - she died shortly thereafter - but she was opinionated. She has this great line that I use in our Carnegie Hall concert, ’The saddest day in my life was the day John Hinckley missed.’ She was lying in bed in a turban and we were watching the news. This was during the Reagan Years, and it was the most amazing thing I heard from this woman from my parents’ generation. She inspired this character. And Lillian Hellman was also one of my inspiration, and Carol Burnett, comedically. Musically I’d say Diamanda Galas, Melanie. I really like Julie London and that kind of glamorous thing. And Eartha Kitt - she was a huge inspiration. I remember when I was young she was blacklisted after going after Lady Bird Johnson in the White House. I met her around the time I first started to do Kiki."

Kiki was also an offshoot of Bond’s ACT-UP experience. At the time he recalls being angry at the government that was ignoring those suffering with the infliction, but realized that to express that as a 20-something man would simply sound like rhetoric. So Kiki became his mouthpiece, he explained "because when these sentiments were expressed by a drunk, 70-something singer, they didn’t seem shrill. She could say things that I couldn’t get away with, and people laughed and clapped. It was great. And the fact that she was such a hag was also a way of expressing my bitterness at the situation. So many people were dying then. Kiki was my way of dealing with it."

"There was something so extreme about Kiki that she scared me," Mellman recalled. "I didn’t know what to think of her at first."

That was in 1992. In 1994 Bond moved to New York. He got the pair a gig at a New York cabaret, and sent for Mellman; but he didn’t stay in New York beyond the engagement and returned to San Francisco. The next year, though, he moved to New York and the pair began their ascent into show business legend (so to speak.) Kiki mellowed a bit with age, and the pair began to gain a following in New York’s downtown scene, which culminated in a long run off Broadway and a sold out farewell appearance at Carnegie Hall. (After their retirement, Bond moved to London to study set design; while Mellman stayed in New York pursuing musical endeavors.)

But, like Cher, there’s never an end to farewell appearance, and the pair was back - this time on Broadway with a hit show that had no less than Ben Brantley of the New York Times raving. It is (he wrote) "a hyper-magnified cabaret concert that has the heat and dazzle of great balls of fire. . . like most of the best artists of their generation, Mr. Bond and Mr. Mellman have tunneled under the ironic distance that seems to have been their birthright to reclaim the passion beneath the pose. The musical styling of Herb (whose liquidly bobbing head and blissed-out expression suggest that his nervous system is located in the strings of his piano) and the vocals of Kiki are radioactive with an angry sorrow, ecstasy and cosmic fatigue so profound that it turns into cosmic punch-drunkenness."

One thing they realized when performing their show off-Broadway was that performing the same show night-after-night was, well, dull. For Broadway, and this upcoming engagement at the Calderwood Pavilion (retitled Alive From Broadway) that opens this week, they plan on breaking things up a bit. "When we made the Broadway show we had sections put in that allowed us to improvise on whatever is going on, because when we did the off-Broadway show six months before, nothing ever changed. And that was boring. So there are parts of the show that we did on Broadway that were set aside to do anything we want. So it will change nightly, and throughout the run."

In other words expect Kiki to rant some on current events. Maybe even a comment or two about Paris Hilton, and certainly President Bush.

For years Bond recalls never being recognized out of his Kiki guise because he looks nothing like the aging singer. Recently, though, his appearance in John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus has people recognizing him in the street. In that film he plays the host of the party - called the Shortbus - where most anything goes, sexually speaking. "Making that movie was fun. I was only on the set for three days. I flew in from London and did the film, but I knew a majority of the people in the movie for years. Making it was okay, but I was also lucky because I was there on the day of the big orgy scene, and that was interesting. They shot part of it over my shoulder, so you could see I was in the room. It was hot. The really fun part was when the movie was finished, and we went to Cannes and then were at the New York premiere and the London premiere. There were just 10 years ago performing in these dives in New York, and then there we are 10 years later at Cannes - so it’s been a really fun experience so far."

Kiki and Herb: Alive From Broadway runs through June 30 at the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont St., Boston, MA. Performances: Tuesdays-Thursday 7:30pm; Friday 8:00pm; Saturday 4:00pm and 8:00pm; and Sunday (June 17 only)2:00 pm. Tickets: $25.00--$50.00. For more information visit bostontheatrescene.com.