Unlike many performers, her interest level didn’t flag when we spoke about something other than her. In fact, I found her to be sweet, candid, self-aware, and-dare I say it-almost demure. It seemed like the perfect place to meet, though the woman I met was different in many ways from the raunchy, boozy, and frequently vulgar stage persona she has created. I recently caught up with Bridget on a chilly autumn night in a dimly lit, west village watering hole. Indeed, the future looks bright, but it wasn’t always so. After all, she’s got Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, the hottest songwriting team on Broadway, and a burgeoning cult of passionate fans tucked into her ample décolletage. But from where I’m sitting, cabaret needs Bridget Everett far more than she needs them. “It would feel good to feel more connected to the older guard cabaret establishment,” she admitted with a slight shrug of her shoulder, especially since she has great respect for both the American Songbook and its many iconic interpreters. That Miss Everett is essentially exiled from the mainstream cabaret scene, a moribund community frequently engaged in a bizarre act of collective denial that it is not, in fact, 1955, is but one of the more ironic examples of this artist’s adroit skill surmounting obstacles. Her ability to deftly fuse the stand-up’s fearlessness with such a prodigious set of pipes is why she is rapidly becoming the first performer to break out the cabaret scene and onto a national stage in many, many years. But it could have been bad.” This is an understatement.Įverett’s aerialist approach to live performance is only one of the qualities that makes her the rising star of the downtown cabaret scene. “It was horrible,” she went on, “that’s the most damage I’ve ever done to somebody and luckily he was fine. “I don’t ever want to have a scripted way of getting around something,” Bridget told me, recalling the incident over a glass of wine a few weeks later, “I want to deal with things as they come.” She needn’t have worried, as I doubt there is a scripted way to get around accidentally dropping a fan on his head, but her point about taking risks and challenging convention is well-taken and very much at the heart of what she does. ![]() The sequence of events resonated like a fever dream that mounded an entire performance’s worth of emotion into a single number. When her bravura ad-libbed monologue had ended, the handsome man returned to his seat, apparently no worse for the wear, and the thrill ride that is a Bridget Everett performance continued (relatively) uneventfully. ![]() Fueled by her own fear of the near-catastrophe and the shock that still hung over the room like a sustained, suspended chord, Bridget Everett turned a potentially terrible moment into a reason for the audience to love her even more. The audience gasped and no sooner had we begun to process what had happened then something extremely brilliant happened: having established that the gentleman was unhurt, Everett remained seated on the stage, clutching the poor guy to her not unimpressive bosom like an injured bird and reflexively began a five minute stream-of-consciousness riff of exceptional, turbo-charged creativity that was nothing short of stunning. Bridget Everett photographed by David Kimelman To the extent that there was a plan, everything appeared to be to be sticking to it, then something extremely unexpected happened: as the song was nearing its finish, Bridget Everett dropped something much worse than a note or a cue, she dropped the man-nearly on his head-and together they fell to the floor in a big unscripted heap. In an extreme twist on the stand-up comic’s device of using an audience member as a prop, Miss Everett first charmed him out of his shirt, (she is nothing if not persuasive, along with many other qualities that are most useful to an entertainer) and proceeded to physically pick him up, put him over her shoulder and carry him back to the stage, all the while singing the song without missing a note. As she began the ballad “Why Don’t You Kiss Me?,” the singer/comedienne made her way into the audience (as she is wont to do) and targeted a particularly attractive young man. Half-way through the recent Joe’s Pub debut of Rock Bottom, Bridget Everett’s terrific new show which was written in collaboration with musical theater titans Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray, Smash), along with Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, the audience had the opportunity to witness the full range of Everett’s particular brand of show business alchemy in just one song.
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