Sandra Bernhard has been hosting her now-legendary New Year’s Eve variety show for decades, enchanting scores of delighted guests with her eclectic musical choices, her unique voice, her utterly engaging stories, and her unending starpower. Bernhard’s love for life cannot be tapped down by year-end global conundrums, whatever they may be, as evidenced by her 1999 show entitled 2001: A Sandra Odyssey, which critics of the time called, assuming the world would literally end January 1, 2000, “throwing caution to the wind on New Year’s Eve in New York City, the night when even Broadway producers aren’t tempting millennial fate.”
“It’s my superstition,” Ms. Bernhard explained to us on a Zoom call earlier this month. “If I perform the last night of the year, I’ll perform the rest of the new year. It’s what I believe. So I had to perform! Even during COVID I did a little complimentary show on Instagram Live. I mean, it was so weird to do it from my bedroom… but I think people really appreciated it.”
And appreciate it they do, as lovers of Sandra’s New Year’s Eve magic have been faithfully returning year after year. This year’s show will take place at Joe’s Pub in NoHo, a venue Bernhard has been patronizing for some 15 years non-stop at this point.
“I love the intimacy of Joe’s Pub,” she says. “Plus, I don’t have to travel because I’m based in New York. Also I have my musicians here and I can come home and sleep in my bed and eat my food at the end of the day. It really makes a difference. Because it’s kind of like a marathon…” She stops for a moment to recall: “I’m doing 10 shows in six nights. Wow, yeah that is a lot. So I gotta be where I can really recalibrate, ya know?”
Although putting on any show is a difficult labor of love, this show has been dubbed Easy Listening, and includes the aforementioned six day string of shows that starts the day after Christmas and culminates at its 11PM show on December 31. With nostalgia as a driving force behind culture these days, it seems fitting that an artist like Bernhard with her finger on the pulse would choose now to break out numbers from culture-building figures like the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Simon & Garfunkel, Dusty Springfield, and our dearly departed Ms. Tina Turner. Figures, we should add, many of whom Bernhard has personally met and worked with.
“I’ve met Simon and Garfunkel several times over the years, but I can’t say we’re intimate,” Bernhard says with her signature grin. “Diana Ross I’ve definitely met and she’s a delight. I met Tina Turner briefly, but I tell that story in the show. But who I cover in the show are all artists people know and people respect and who people have turned to for years and years and years of musical consistency and comfort. I think in these truly crazy times, everybody’s looking for something that has a sense of authenticity to it.”
And if anyone is authentic, Sandra Bernhard certainly is: aside from her many accolades in singing and acting and as a media personality on her eponymous SiriusXM radio show Sandyland, her charity work, which stretches back decades as well, speaks for itself. Just this November, she went on a mini-tour in Texas, touching down in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, on Sandyland Presents: Stand with Texas, which supported and raised funds for reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and education in the Lone Star State.
“Each night, representatives from the various organizations we worked with on this tour got up and spoke and I would interview them,” Bernhard shares of her down-South tour. “I think things like that have a ripple effect. For someone dealing with these issues in Texas, knowing somebody from New York City came down and cared and was there and was supporting their causes, I think that’s powerful. Wherever you can do that sort of thing as an artist, it has a lot of impact.”
If you’d like to join Sandra Bernhard and her crowd of merrymakers for a New Year’s show in 2023, you can still purchase tickets HERE.
“I’m always excited for the New Year’s shows,” Bernhard says. “People pop by that I haven’t seen for awhile. I get to meet a bunch of people I’ve never met. I always sign merch at the end of the show. People come up to me in the lobby and they buy a t-shirt, they buy a poster, they buy a CD, and we take pictures. Often people who listen to my show Sandyland will come and say, ‘it’s me, I called in and spoke to you!’ And then I’m like, ‘oh my god, yes, hi!’ So it’s this whole celebration.”
Smiling, she finishes, “I think above and beyond performing and writing new material and getting to put a new show together, it’s community, being with people, that I love so much. New friends, old friends. People who really appreciate what I do and then come to see me and say hi.”
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