As a self-described “alt-cabaret provocateur,” Bridget Everett is like a mixed martial artist you never see coming, all bare flying fists, feet (in the direction of your mouth), legs and, in Everett’s case, breasts as well. So essential are naked bosoms to her aesthetic that her new live tour showcase is titled Big Titties, Big Dreams.
Add to her willingness to reveal a bare-faced, bold-faced honesty and a wildly bawdy mouth that roars, and a broader picture of Everett emerges. Combine electric Ike-era Tina Turner, performative punk poetess Kathy Acker and rude, ranting chanteuse Peaches, and the result would be Everett. All of this, one must add, is a set of talents in total opposition to her quietly stewing acting work in HBO’s sorely missed, Peabody Award-winning dramedy, Somebody Somewhere.
There was nuance to be found in both Everett’s acting in Somebody Somewhere and during her live presentation at the Miller Theater with her intuitively taut, showy ensemble, the Tender Hearts, along for the bumpy ride. You just had to wait for the more silent, more vulnerable moments—among other body parts—to spill forth onstage.
Because between the loud (“Come With Me”), the lewd (“Canhole”) and the risqué hilarity of toying with a willing-to-play audience with cans of whipped cream and extended naked limbs—beyond a brawling, bawling, balling voice that can put Janis Joplin to shame—there is quiet. There is longing. There is weighty emotionality. There are songs that Everett wrote such as “You Brought Me Home,” which expresses what it meant to never be chosen and to fear as much as a lifetime’s fate. Perhaps cornier—but none the less naked, defenseless and romancing—was her choice of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” in a raw, still-elegant rendition that will never allow you to hear it without Everett’s focus and passion.
Everett and her band were non-stop when it came to rocking, jazzing, tense, tight musicality and smart, sex-forward humor. But one thing that Everett said hit home for anyone who’s trying to avoid the debacle that is the current presidency and the ruin that it’s wrought in comparison with our very recent past and how art in America’s been funded.
“I got an NEA grant not despite that I sing about genitals, but because I sing about genitals.”
Play that at the Trump Kennedy Center.
—A.D. Amorosi; photo by Brent Goldman
