A lifelong fan of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the New York cabaret star Salty Brine likes to use the title as a verb, he tells us. To Frankenstein something is to solder together disregarded old parts and make something new. “Shall we try it?” Bigmouth Strikes Again duly stitches Shelley’s novel, The Smiths’ album The Queen Is Dead, and episodes from Salty’s own biography into a creature whose life is weirdly but entirely its own.
The audacity of the undertaking is – as it was in Frankenstein – part of the thrill. If trad jukebox musicals can strain to fit lyrics to dramatic action, they’ve got nothing on this show, which must persuade us that Morrissey’s words and the plot of an 1818 gothic horror fit (disembodied) hand in glove. Brine pulls it off – which shouldn’t surprise us, as he’s done something similar with the Beatles, Adele and others as part of his Living Record Collection project in the US. Here, the tales he tells (Shelley’s, Frankenstein’s, and his own) are playfully, skilfully interwoven and looped back on one another to harmonise with one track after another on The Queen Is Dead.
Does the undertaking sometimes proceed, like Victor Frankenstein’s creation, with a lumbering gait? Only occasionally. Some songs (Vicar in a Tutu, anyone?) resist the transplant; some are drafted from other albums because they’re too neat-fitting (“I am human and I need to be loved”, indeed) to ignore. The conceit requires some self-mythologising on our host’s part, too, who for dramatic purposes must identify as a self-made monster of sorts – a poet manqué (reciting his juvenilia here), starved of love and enslaved to the stage.
He certainly makes the place his own. From his first entrance, swaddled in Arctic furs to narrate the opening of Shelley’s novel, he’s a storyteller in total command of voice, a cocked eyebrow and his audience. The songs, too – with music from Salty’s four-piece backing band – are reinvented and recognisable, deeply felt, and precisely calibrated to the themes (alienation, loneliness, thwarted romance) around which the show circles. An improbable assemblage Bigmouth Strikes Again may be – but unmistakably, “it’s alive!”
Bigmouth Strikes Again is at Soho theatre, London, until 16 September.
