Brooke Shields has stories for days. Some of those stories are traumatic, but a lot of them are just bizarre. Liza Minnelli once gave her a private, 45-minute concert. Elizabeth Taylor once asked Shields to pre-chew her gum (eww). Dean Martin used to call her when she was in high school, just to talk.
“I practically came out of the womb famous,” Shields tells the audience at the top of her new one-woman show, Previously Owned by Brooke Shields. And she’s not lying: She’s been working since she was 11 months old.
Presented by Bird in Hand, an Australian winery, Previously Owned opened earlier this week at the historic Café Carlyle in New York, with many of Shields’s notable friends in attendance—Laura Dern, Mariska Hargitay, Naomi Watts, Billy Crudup, Alan Cumming, and Christian Siriano among them.
The show is in turns a painfully self-aware reflection on Shields’s life to date and a true musical spectacular, making it clear that she has both a good sense of humor and quite a nice voice. (Don’t forget that she’s appeared on Broadway a number of times, including in productions of Grease, Chicago, and Cabaret.) It arrives a few months after the two-part documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields debuted on Hulu, in which Shields looks back at her career as an actress and model; at her relationship with her mother, who struggled with alcoholism; and at the pervasive exploitation and blurry boundaries that accompanied her rise to fame.
While the documentary is potent and tender, the solo show assumes a more lighthearted tone, spending more time on Shields’s recent past and present. Her breakout role in Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby (1978) has become a cornerstone of her legacy, but it’s only mentioned briefly; instead, Shields focuses on her love for her daughters and her husband, a subject that, at the performance I attended, moved her to tears in several instances.
Yet for the most part, the approximately one-hour show feels almost like a made-for-streaming comedy special. Her storytelling cadence somewhat evokes the sentimental style of Mike Birbiglia, with all its confessional stories and callbacks. She has clearly familiarized herself with the art of self-deprecating humor and deftly employs it to laugh at much of her unambiguously wild life.
Shields had several close collaborators in the creation of Previously Owned, including her pianist and vocal partner, Charlie Alterman, and her cowriter and director, Nate Patten. In a conversation with Vogue after the show, she talked about sitting down with Patten and a blank page. “Nate and I just started talking about what songs I like to listen to and what songs move me. And he started just saying, ‘Okay, where do they fit in your voice?’”
Previously Owned’s nine resulting numbers include the original up-tempo jazz tune “Fame Is Weird,” which somewhat speaks for itself: When she was a preteen, Shields’s first period was the subject of a story in People magazine, and George Bush gave her dating advice. She also incorporated some of her favorite songs, like Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time” and her idol Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” Her life is about as far from relatable as it gets—and yet much of her story still has an uncanny universality to it. Even Shields has had moments of being starstruck (by none other than Outlander’s Tobias Menzies), of humiliation, and of getting things wrong in motherhood.
“There is something to be said for, ‘You made me feel something, and I want to tell you thank you” Shields reflects. “What we crave to know is that we’re moving people—that what we’re doing is not just for us.”
Previously Owned by Brooke Shields opened at Cafe Carlyle on September 12 and will run through September 23.