These Are The Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) ★★★★★

Some shows are so wildly creative and uniquely imaginative that they can leave other Fringe efforts looking distinctly pedestrian. These Are The Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) is such a show.

New York-based cabaret creator Salty Brine has built quite the following for his Living Record Collection, a series of shows that take an artist’s masterpiece album (whether that be Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Radiohead’s OK Computer or Weezer’s Pinkerton) and transmogrifies them into an entirely different and unexpected style. This change renders what is so well-known suddenly unfamiliar and exciting.

These Are The Contents of My Head takes the glacial, antiseptic phychodramas of Annie Lennox’s extraordinary debut solo album Diva and channels them through the ultimate showbiz diva of psychodrama, Judy Garland. Songs such as Walking On Broken Glass are interpreted in the style of Judy, live at Carnegie Hall. But, fun as it would be, that would be too straightforward and direct for a cabaret thaumaturge such as Salty Brine.

He adds in a narrative thread taken from Kate Chopin’s turn-of-the-century novel The Awakening into the blend. The story of the protagonist in this landmark feminist work, Edna Pontellier, becomes a character in this musical extravaganza, which fuses plot and lyrical content so it blurs where one begins and the other ends.

Still not enough intertextuality for you? The whole caboodle is then focalised through the autobiographical filter of a young Salty growing up. The result is a dizzying and dangerous cultural Charybdis, where you are buffeted between the waves of the complex layers that Salty Brine has conjured up.

He has charm and charisma to burn. “I’m going to sing you a little song and if you don’t like it, there’s nothing I can do about it” he quips, momentarily echoing Kiki DuRane, another cabaret legend unafraid to take risks. But what makes the show so outstanding is the scope of its ambition. While many cabaret entertainments can switch from camp to catastrophe, from drag to dramatic, few will do so with the flair and panache of Salty Brine.

Some might find These Are The Contents of My Head too demanding, too literate, too clever… but these are the words I’ve never said.