Bridget Everett is a tonic – refreshing and revivifying. Her winter show at Joe’s Pub is the perfect antidote to anodyne holiday “cheer.” She’s raunchy as all get-out, of course: No matter how shock-proof you may imagine yourself to be, prepare to be scandalized. She’s also tender of heart, and one of the most gifted singers ever to mount a stage, from cabaret to concert hall.
Everett muses, early on in this season’s revue, whether fans come to see her for the antics or the “money notes.” Here’s the trick: They’re all money notes. The uses to which she puts her pipes may push the boundaries of good taste (of any pretense of taste), but her voice is at once full and pure, tonally perfect. With all due respect to Garland loyalists: You have not truly experienced “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” until you’ve melted to Everett’s version. “I always miss my family right about now,” she prefaces this chestnut. “I don’t want to see them, but I miss them.”
Even if she weren’t such a superb singer, Everett would be heralded as a storyteller. A messed-up childhood is the gift that keeps on giving. Some of her tales are doozies, like the time her newly divorced mother had her spy through the window as her father … let’s just say “pleased” his secretary, Cindy. Everett plays all the parts. There is no gesture too lewd for her to enact onstage.
And that’s what her fans come for: liberation – from taboos, from body-shaming (she puts it all, or nearly all, out there), from any approbation attached to the pleasures of the flesh. Tellingly, half the audience on a recent night was female, with many of the women paired up, and yet no one seemed to have any trouble belting out Everett’s signature song, “What I Gotta Do to Get That Dick in My Mouth?” Tenori and bassi chimed in.
We have another season of Everett’s HBO series Somebody Somewhere to look forward to in 2023, in which, with any luck, the bushel hiding her semi-autobiographical, stuck-in-Kansas light will budge a bit further. She did get to wail “Piece of My Heart” on the show, and on YouTube you can catch some of the scandalous oeuvre she has created with her game backing band, The Tender Moments, over the past decade. But make no mistake: There’s no substitute for the live experience. Anything can go down, and most probably will.
Bridget Everett & The Tender Moments opened December 5, 2022, at Joe’s Pub and runs through December 14. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
