Sandra Bernhard’s new show, “Everything Bad & Beautiful,” should provide confirmation for those who complain that downtown is becoming too uptown. As usual, Ms. Bernhard is playing to downtown crowds, this time just off Union Square; she’s foul-mouthed and aggressive, both in her comedy-cabaret monologues and in her harsh rock ballads.That aggression is the only thing that invigorates “Everything Bad & Beautiful,”a collection of boring, conventional bits about Ms. Bernhard’s yuppie lifestyle, her celebrity friends, and her affection for motherhood. It’s as if the teeth have been taken out of that famous snarl.

In Chelsea and Union Square, the Whole Foods Market has usurped the place of the bodega; in the once-bohemian West Village, there are Marc Jacobs boutiques and $400 haircuts. Ms. Bernhard, by her own account, is one of the well-off people who have taken over downtown style without adopting core downtown values. The mother of a 7-year-old living with her female partner, she is part of an almost suburban downtown crowd, whose members differentiate themselves from their suburban counterparts by their colorful pasts, their choice to raise kids in the city, and their earnest liberal concerns.

For a woman who stresses her grungy downtown cred, Ms. Bernhard seems to live pretty large. After listening to her talk about her nannies, her celebrity hairdresser, her shoe repair guy, her flat bed on the flight to Australia, and her suite at the W Hotel, it’s hard to take her seriously when she rails against consumerism and blasts the rich for “openly mock[ing] the poor.” Excuse me, but wasn’t she openly mocking the poor when (in another of the show’s celebrity anecdotes) she went to have truffled pasta at midnight with Karl Lagerfeld?

As if to reassure us of her goodness, Ms. Bernhard takes pains to mention that she once worked in a nail salon, before launching into a confused and flat bit about her Guatemalan nanny. “The emotions of the women from Central America!” she exclaims, half-ironic, but only half. She proceeds to tell the sad story of her nanny Anita, who left her own children behind to care for Ms. Bernhard’s daughter. When Ms. Bernhard met Anita’s daughter Vicky, she quips, she understood why Anita left – Vicky just has no enthusiasm.

This is just one of her several rude remarks in the show that smack of racism. Ms. Bernhard is clearly aware that she’s walking the razor’s edge with her audience when she uses blunt cracks about race. At one point she tells the crowd, “You know I’m not a racist,” to preface a story, and when she introduces the black singer in her band,she boasts that she was given an award for hiring women of color.

Frankly, being in Ms. Bernhard’s band doesn’t seem such an enviable gig these days. Musically (as narratively), Ms. Bernhard doesn’t seem to have much to say, recycling old pop songs by Prince and Christina Aguilera, among others. Ms. Bernhard gives the songs raw energy and a little rock-‘n’-roll glam. But it’s her formidable stage presence that’s carrying them and not their standard arrangements, and certainly not their relevance to the script.

All this fails to explain why Ms. Bernhard is being scripted anyway. Once, early in the show, an audience member called out to her, and she took the energy and made an off-the-cuff riff that felt satisfyingly live. With a sigh, she announced that she had to go back to the canned monologue.

This was a shame, because the script – those internally inconsistent rants coming out of her mouth, laced with four-letter words to give you the occasional jolt – is really beside the point. The question is why we should care about her opinions – which are neither particularly insightful nor particularly fresh. Jokes about the 2004 election? It’s a little late. And after six years of late-night television, it’s hard to make a meal out of President Bush’s drunk driving,Laura Bush being a librarian,or the Bush twins’ partying. In one breath she mocks Celine Dion’s sappy idealization of motherhood; in the next, she offers an equally saccharine one.

Ms. Bernhard’s real strength is not her overrated social commentary or her decent rock stylings, but her charisma. She’s one of those performers, like Eminem or Elvis, who seem to be running on rocket fuel when they’re onstage. The things she does during the show – taking off her dress and putting on jeans, dancing, even getting a drink of water – are vivid.You can’t stop watching her.That quality is rare enough, and she should be in a show that is about her magnetism – and nothing else.

Until May 28 (20 Union Square East at 15th Street, 212-239-6200).