[1] Between 1995 and 1996 Kiki and Herb appeared regularly at "Cowgirl Hall of Fame" in Greenwich Village, where they honed their show and built their fanbase.
[4] The duo appeared in a cameo role in the 2004 feature film Imaginary Heroes, released that year by Sony Pictures and starring, among others, Emile Hirsch, Jeff Daniels, and Sigourney Weaver.
For Brantley, Kiki "suggests some wondrous hybrid of Marianne Faithfull, Elaine Stritch, Patti Smith and Kitty Carlisle Hart," her vocals "radioactive with an angry sorrow, ecstasy, and cosmic fatigue" in which "the point is never the prettiness of the voice but the history behind it and the passion to endure that vibrates within.
On May 15, 2007, Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway was nominated for a Tony Award for "Best Special Theatrical Event"; the New York Observer predicted the duo would win,[7] but they did not.
[9] In September 2015, Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman announced the return of Kiki and Herb with a new show, Seeking Asylum!
This involved the characters meeting as children in a mental institution before becoming a jazz act in the fifties, beginning a long and chequered career mixing periods of success and misfortune.
Between songs Kiki would tell anecdotes from her life, including her friendships with Billie Holiday and Grace Kelly, and the details of her various relationships, whilst drinking heavily and often having on-stage rages and breakdowns.
However, in "Alive on Broadway," they introduced the notion that the fictional backstory may be meta-fictional—Kiki spoke of the duo actually being thousands of years old, implying that some of her previous stories were, at least in part, lies told by the character.