Cabaret This article is more than 9 years oldReviewBridget Everett's Rock Bottom: a wet and wild, hot mess of a show
This article is more than 9 years oldEverett’s shtick is a little samey, but there’s something deeply gratifying about a woman celebrating her appetite for sex and rock’n’roll
Bridget Everett has a singing voice that’s perfectly nice, and a body that’s perfectly naughty. A cabaret star of the booze-swilling, nipple-slipping variety, Everett sports a straw-blond mane, a serpentine tongue, and cleavage that rivals the Mariana Trench. Her hot mess of a solo(ish) show, Rock Bottom, at New York City’s Joe’s Pub, extols the virtues of an unexamined life and an oaky chardonnay.
For this Downtown stint, she’s attracted a tight backing band and songwriters as varied as Hairspray’s Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, and Beastie Boy Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz. There’s also Let Me Live, a number by Pat Boone. That one is sung by her soon-to-be-aborted fetus.
A pub and club stalwart for nearly a decade, Everett is chaotic and audacious. Dressed in a muumuu, she opens the show with a promise: “Tonight, I’m gonna say some shit, and then I’m gonna do some shit, and then I still won’t be done. So grab your panties, honey, because she’s about to get real real.”
And she is. Everett’s crowd work is of the take-no-prisoners variety. As she moves through the Joe’s Pub space, she’s liable to pick your nose, drink your wine, slap you with a dildo, thrust your face between her titanic tits, or commiserate with you about rectal bleeding. If you’re very lucky, she’ll order you to lick whipped cream from her upper thigh. On a recent night, two older me took to the task so enthusiastically that they all risked a public indecency charge. Of course, public indecency is pretty much Everett’s sweet spot.
It’s the wet and wild numbers that work best, like the Ad-Rock-assisted Eat It or Does This Dick Make My Ass Look Big? The title song, a paean to possible liver failure, contains the immortal couplet: “Still spending them days watching Murder She Wrote/ Guess I missed the toilet cause I shit in my coat.” Every so often Everett slows down for a serious number like the dead daddy anthem “Get Over You” and you keep waiting for the punch line – feeling sort of awkward and guilty when it doesn’t come. But Everett can juice up and dress down most any sung, like a love ballad that she cheerfully despoils by sitting on a spectator’s face while she sings the chorus.
Under Wittman’s direction, Everett can rely too much on the same outrageous gestures and expression – eyes squinted, tongue jutting. And there’s a sameness to her tales of debauchery. But there’s also something deeply gratifying about a woman celebrating an infinite appetite for Sonoma county whites and casual sex. The enthusiasm with which she describes a cavalcade of sexual conquests (including a steamy night with Ralph Fiennes) upsets centuries of slut v stud dynamics. Pregnancy and STDs worry her about as much as a hangover.
There are moments when you don’t know whether to applaud her or haul her ass to a women’s heath clinic and an AA meeting. But could a clean and respectable woman write anything as exciting and anthemic as the glorious “Titties”? Everett has a way of making bad taste seem pretty delicious. As one of the whipped cream-licking elders called from the back of the room, “Hey, Bridget! You taste good.”
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