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.
