Concert Review—Sandra Bernhard at City Winery, NYC

Sandra Bernhard

May 24, 2022

City Winery, New York City

citywinery.com

Sandra Bernhard at City Winery

Since I first saw Sandra Bernhard, in 1984 at Buffalo's old Tralfamadore Café (now the Tralf Music Hall), she has used her sardonic wit and pop savvy to comment knowingly and hilariously on our deadened celebrity culture. Her concert last week at City Winery in Manhattan proved that, nearly four decades later, Bernhard has lost none of her unique insights into what is wrong with…well, everything.

Of course, Bernhard is a terrific singer as well, always choosing the perfect songs that both underscore her humor and work well musically. Her City Winery opener, “Make Your Own Kind of Music”—a minor hit for Mama Cass in 1969—stated Bernhard’s case from the start as an original and always honest performer. 

Bernhard doesn’t tell jokes, of course, but colorful anecdotes of the absurdities that permeate her life—and, by extension, ours. The pandemic hit the resident of the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan quite hard (as anyone who listens to her weekly Sirius show, Sandyland, can attest), so listening to her describing life during lockdown is both painful and bracingly funny. For those of us who were in attendance at her comeback show last August (also at City Winery), some of these COVID tales were familiar, but she always adds the kind of telling details that mark her genius as a storyteller.

For 90 minutes, Bernhard alternated her perfectly pitched stories with a selection of tunes performed with her crack band, led by pianist and music director Mitch Kaplan, from the Stone Poneys’ “Different Drum” and Lana Del Rey’s “Summertime Sadness” to LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and Rod Stewart’s “Mandolin Wind.” In between were her priceless observations, like recounting this Chelsea rooftop conversation: “I’m writing the definitive biography of Chopin”—“Sean Penn? I love Sean Penn!” 

In this fraught moment in our history, after the Buffalo and Texas massacres and with the Supreme Court about to return women to the pre-Roe vs. Wade dark ages, Bernard ended her show with her soulful take on Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.” It was interspersed with musings about the direction of our country that she witnessed on a recent drive to and from a performance in Philadelphia. “We found pieces of America—not free—barely brave,” she said, closing with the incisive comment, “If you find America, let me know where it is.”