Review by Steve Bennett

Sandra Bernhard is certainly defiant. She defies time itself – looking fabulous just days from her 54th birthday, grinding around in skin-tight trousers most women half her age couldn’t get away with – and she defies pigeonholing, with a show that is one part comedy, one part autobiographical ‘spoken word’, one part rock gig, one part cabaret.

People gather just to be in her presence, just to be close to this playful, savage, strangely beautiful creature. The actual show is almost an irrelevance.

This one is billed, with only some degree of accuracy, as the 20-year revival of the Eighties performance that helped make her name. Some set pieces remain from that show – such as her lusty rendition of Me & Mrs Jones, the joyous celebration of gay nightlife and the recollection of her childhood fantasies of marriage to a nice WASP man – but a lot has been changed, to update the Without You I’m Nothing brand name.

Even the opening number, a breathlessly mangled version of Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful, postdates the original by a decade and a half. The other tracks she covers, with varying degrees of reverence, range from sultry torch songs to pounding rock anthems. Between them, the banter flits haphazardly between personal reminiscences, withering commentary and surreal fantasies.

She’s at her fearless finest when snarling out withering put-downs, kvetching about the round of interviews she endured today, the missed lighting cue or the London accommodation her promoter provided that she felt unbefitting a magnificent woman such as herself. Her face is built for distain, and it takes only the most minor of gesture to make her displeasure felt. Even the audience are not except, as she frequently berates us for not giving her material the response she knows it deserves.

In k, only selected highlight are laugh-out-loud funny. She starts strongly with the bitching, hilariously breaking off only to update her Twitter page: ‘Having a fabulous time on stage. Wish you were here’. Her memories of her early days in Los Angeles are evocative of a bygone era, and the routine in which she heaps a tankerful of scorn on the vacuity of the fashion world simply by reading selected quotes from Harper’s Bazaar is delightfully dismissive.

Not that she’s entirely consistent in her point of view. She evangelises about the world feeling on the precipice of a more compassionate new order, mocks the excesses of the West through the device of a letter from a sponsored Third World child and again highlights the futility of fashion with a song insisting we all look better naked. But she does this while wearing a pair of vertiginous Manolo Blahnik and a cocktail dress I’ll wager didn’t come from the Primark sale rack. It’s all part of the stylishly packaged mass of contradictions that define her.

Some of the monologues drooped, especially when she became too lost in celebrity; getting rather too carried away in her daydream about an encounter with Stevie Nicks or dropping names that you’d have to be an avid reader of the gossip columns to recognise. Though jibes about her famous ex, Madonna, is always a crowd-pleaser

In the 21 years since the original Without You I’m Nothing, Benhard has settled down with a girlfriend (prompting another rambling segment about marriage) and become mother to Cicely, now 10. But has she calmed down? Has she made her stage act more mature? Has she polished this uneasy show into a consistent, coherent whole? Has she hell.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
London, May 2009

Review date: 1 Jan 2009
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett