More clever critics than me have long since noted that Sandra Bernhard shows are a lot like exaggerated lounge acts. She ambles on stage, belts out a few standards from the ol’ songbook and fills in the in-betweens with some idle chatter about this and that — though in her case the shows are mostly talk, not music.
All of it is generally entertaining if not terribly original. Just like a Tuesday night in Atlantic City, or yesterday evening at Massey where Ms. B spent most of her two hours on stage dishing randomly and more than a little lazily about her daughter, Kabala and fashion magazines between faithful renditions of “Whole Lotta Love” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” among others.
Do her stand-up bits mix awkwardly with the musical numbers? Of course they do. They always have. Though rousing, her song “Undressed” — which included walk-ons by four hard bodies who stripped down to their spandex — came out of nowhere after her bit about having Thanksgiving with ultra-vegan Chrissy Hines and led into a series of too-easy shots at a lottery tumbler list of celebs like Antonio Banderas, Sally Field and Joan Collins.
Oh, and let’s not forget the inevitable jab at Madonna, her perhaps-former-girlfriend from 20 years ago who, after some prompting from the crowd, came under fire from Bernhard for her recent and unoriginal music-making. Not that Bernhard has topped any charts lately. Here’s a woman who’s been coasting on bit parts and other people’s lyrics — “Little Red Corvette” makes an encore appearance in this latest show — since the Reagan era and she’s casting stones at “4 Minutes to Save the World”? Honey, please. Glass houses.