Stage

"I am an actress. I am a performah. I am a superstar!" The crowd roars and Sandra Bernhard raises her arms like a drag-queen messiah, all fabulousness and mock ego. In her new show, I'm Still Here ... Damn It! -- with a long, red, skintight dress showing off her pregnant tummy -- she brings together a peculiar confluence of genres and cultures while reciting poetry, cracking jokes, bantering with the audience, and singing songs, mostly pop-schlock classics from the '70s and '80s but also odd stuff like a take on a Muslim call-to-prayer song. The good news is that she is the whole show. The bad news is that she is, well, the whole show.

Caustic, energetic, witty, and self-obsessed, Bernhard embodies Los Angeles' spectacle of desire. She's at once transfixed by fame, celebrity, and glamour and she's smart enough to know how tacky these compulsions are. "I look at all the pretty clothes and pretty things that people have given me and I feel like I'm a lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky girl," she says. "Though I wouldn't want to rub your noses in it." She flaunts her glamour and power over "the little people" even as she ridicules her own unctuous hunger to be part of the celebrity in-crowd -- waiting for hours, for example, in a hotel room for Courtney Love to return her call. In a particularly savage riff on the sanctimoniousness of celebrity mourning she sings a disco tune purportedly written by Naomi Campbell for Gianni Versace. But in this song, as elsewhere in the musical segments that dot the show, she may begin with a sense of irony but she invariably seems to get caught up in the spectacle of her performance -- thereby losing track of the humor. The songs afford her most sincere moments, but they are almost always framed as a joke.

In this way, Bernhard traffics in the sort of postmodern ambiguity that makes a lot of old-school cultural commentators go apeshit, but for me her shtick is just that -- the unprocessed dreck of an unusually witty, gifted woman. Bernhard likes to strut her stuff and can belt out a tune like a regular (or irregular) Babs, but when she takes on "Little Red Corvette," what does one make of it? It doesn't inform her commentary, her bad poetry, or her stand-up bits; it's just what Bernhard wants to do. Critics have said this show is about celebrity, but that's not exactly true: It's about the obsessions of a woman who happens to be celebrity-struck. Content is irrelevant: It's all Sandra, all the time, and no one seems to mind. The packed house laughed, clapped, and cheered even when her intentions were utterly muddy. (Why, for example, were we treated to an entire version of Bernhard's rendition of Christine McVie's "Songbird"?)

In some ways, by taking her music so seriously and trying to show off her voice, Bernhard doesn't take advantage of her satirical opportunities. Her songs could be witty rewrites or performance parodies, but as it is, they reinforce the sneaking suspicion that this is all a capricious lark by a woman with more talent than she knows what to do with. "Maybe the show's about being yourself," my husband suggested as we left the theater. Indeed, Bernhard has been a courageously unabashed gay icon in Hollywood since the beginning of her solo career with her show Without You I'm Nothing, and with her groundbreaking gay character on Roseanne. Now, however, she's not such an anomaly; and an unadulterated fascination for glamour is, in the end, too thin a theme for an evening's performance, much less a life.

-- Carol Lloyd