On Audience and Bebe Neuwirth’s “Real Live Girl”

In live performance there is a dialogic relationship between performer and audience wherein the audience listens for the “memory, desire, and hope” that well up in the performer and echo back their own, disparate impressions. Because of Neuwirth’s approach to performance, any lingering preoccupation with Bebe-Neuwirth-as-star falls by the wayside as the song and the story it tells take center stage. Spectators can fully immerse themselves in the narrative because they are unencumbered by the knowledge of an already-established import for its performer.