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Comedy Culture

JFL42 review: Bridget Everett at the Winter Garden

BRIDGET EVERETT at JFL42 on Tuesday (September 25), 9:30 pm, at the Winter Garden (189 Yonge). Rating: NNNN

After having been motorboated by Bridget Everett during her first Toronto appearance at Luminato 2015, during a badly programmed early Monday evening show I knew what to expect from the raunchy cabaret artist.

What I didn’t count on for her second appearance this time at JFL42, last night was her opening act: Murray Hill, another fast-talking, boundary-pushing artist with a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Despite my supposedly safe spot in the middle of a row and the fact that I waved my pen and notebook in the air, Hill summoned me onstage along with two other audience members to engage in an impromptu dance competition. It was an adrenaline-pumped, humbling, endless 30 seconds, karmic payback for any negative reviews I’d given people I’d seen on that very stage.

But the spirit of the night was clearly going “all in.”

Hill, dapper in a black tux, went with the flow, chronicling his use of “15 pairs of Spanx to look 20 pounds overweight,” and satirically observing that we were an “incredibly mixed crowd of white people.”

And then came Everett, who, taking the cue from her opening number, titled Fuck Shit Up, was determined to gleefully motorboat folks, ruffle hair and borrow hats, and, in one squirm-inducing moment for germaphobes, suck on a Jolly Rancher and French kiss it into someone else’s mouth.

Everett, a cult cabaret star in New York (and character actor in various TV shows and films), is like no one else. Skin glistening with sweat, a boob occasionally slipping out of her revealing outfits (two onstage costume changes!), she frequently takes swigs from a bottle in a paper bag before regaling us with stories about young love, her dysfunctional family and her struggles with incontinence.

She’s best at creating a faux sincere tone before launching into one outrageous number after another. The ace up her sleeve if she were wearing any, that is is that she’s got a powerful, soulful voice, even if it is singing lyrics like: “What do I gotta do to get that dick in my mouth?”

There’s something liberating about watching her spread herself so unselfconsciously onstage and in the audience. And lest you think her routine is merely exhibitionistic, consider her exchange with a man she was just about to accost with her breasts.

“You scared, baby boy?” she teased him, in mock earnestness. “Well now you know what it’s like to be a woman.”

Everett performs again tonight (September 26) at the Winter Garden at 7 pm.

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