INTERVIEW: New York cabaret star Salty Brine brings genre-defying cabaret show to London’s Soho Theatre, exploring the Panzy Craze and celebrating Cyndi Lauper

New York cabaret sensation Salty Brine brings his dazzling show He’s So Unusual (The Cyndi Lauper Show) to Soho Theatre next week! For a limited run only. This inventive performance dives into the Pansy Craze and the queer underworld of Prohibition-era in New York, all set to the electrifying soundtrack of Cyndi Lauper’s legendary album She’s So Unusual but also inspired by George Chauncey’s groundbreaking book Gay New York.

Part of New York’s saltiest cabaret star acclaimed Living Record Collection series, the show transforms iconic albums by fusing them with cultural landmarks from literature to opera, crafting evenings of bold, chaotic and unforgettable musical storytelling, so cool!

The Living Record Collection has now grown to an impressive 22 shows. Among them, Salty has staged These Are the Contents of My Head (The Annie Lennox Show) and Bigmouth Strikes Again (The Smiths Show) in Soho, both earning critical acclaim. With the latest installment set to open next week, I sat down for a pre-chat with Salty….

Hey Salty! Firstly, how's your day going and can you introduce yourself and what you do, just for our readers who might not know.

Hi there Dale! My day is going great thanks. I’m getting ready to come to London which always makes me happy. My name is Salty Brine and I’m the creator of the Living Record Collection, a cabaret series that turns whole, amazing albums into wild evenings of theatre.

Can you share the moment when the idea for The Living Record Collection first came to you? What was the very first show you built in this style, and how do you approach turning such well-known songs into something that feels both deeply personal and refreshingly unexpected?

I started making these crazy shows back in 2015 in a very strange and quite magical space on the third floor of an old tenement building in the East Village here in New York. The very first show was built around The Beatles album Abbey Road. I performed all of the songs in the form of a Weimar-era cabaret. It had real oom-pah-pah vibes.

And a re-telling of the Hansel and Gretel story using Beatles music. It was weird and wonderful. As I’ve made more and more shows over the years I’ve slowly developed a process for dissecting whole albums and teasing out what sits at their centres. Any really good album is more than just the sum of its parts. It has something to say to us. Something big about some facet of the human condition like loneliness or longing or discovery or…,in the case of the Cyndi Lauper show, belonging. I’m locating that heartbeat and then finding stories and a form that aligns with it.

George Chauncey’s Gay New York is packed with incredible history and insight, how did it influence the way you built the narrative for your brand new He’s So Unusual (The Cyndi Lauper Show) show?

Well my experience reading George Chauncey’s book about queer life in New York at the turn of the 19th Century was revelatory. It was my history. The history of my people; a story of queerness that had been intentionally erased from the history books. That’s what Gay New York did for me. It gave me a history that I should have grown up with but didn’t. It was very healing.

I wanted to bring that experience off the pages and into the three dimensional world of the theatre. 

The story I tell in the show is an insane fiction that I conjured up myself. But it’s all based on research I did of the period. So we’ve got speakeasies and reformers and pansies and cruising and tons of references to real places and events from that time. And who doesn’t dream of time travelling back to that particular version of New York!? That’s definitely part of the fun of this show. 

What do you think made Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual album the perfect soundtrack for He's So Unusual?

There are so many reasons. Let’s start with the title. Which I think sums up the mission statement of the album. She’s saying, I’m an outsider and maybe you are too and what if that was actually incredible? What if we just lived our lives as ourselves and to hell with the rest? That was a huge statement in 1983. Her look. Her sound. Everything she’s doing says….I’m completely myself. And Ms. Lauper’s debut album is deeply queer. And queer coded. It has nods all the way through it for queer people that the straight world at the time largely missed.

That to me aligned so much with my reading of Gay New York. What is seen and not seen; hidden in plain sight. She has a lyric about Blueboy Magazine. She sings a Prince song and doesn’t change the pronouns of the song’s narrator. She sings about masturbation on She Bop. And then she does the tiniest cover of a song from the 1920's called He’s So Unusual (from which her album gets its name). Which is a song is about a woman who is in love with a man that doesn’t want to kiss her or feel her up….and she doesn’t understand why. But we all know why.

Your work weaves together camp, activism and storytelling, how do you balance those threads without losing the fun?

I think the trick there is that I just try to always be having fun myself. Every single thing I put in my shows is something I think would be fun to do on stage. From a tiny joke to a big story arc. I’m having so much fun up there doing it. My shows are packed with stuff. I don’t hold back on volume. And people often remark that they are surprised that they’re able to hold it all without getting lost.

I find that audiences can hold a ton. And they enjoy being asked to juggle it all with me; all of us tossing the balls into the air and keeping them up there together is also part of the fun. 

The Pansy Craze was wild; do you personally see echoes of it in today’s queer performance scene?

Oh completely. Whether people realise it or not. In my research I discovered so much language that I’d been using for years that was handed down to me through the queer community and it was all from this period. And before!

There are lots of differences about the way queer people exist in the world today but so much of camp and camp mannerisms I would say, even, the purposes of camp-a need for silliness and joy, a celebration of the feminine in a world that devalues it, a defence against the cruellest parts of our society that was all there in the 20's and 30's. That is unchanged. 

If you could time travel to one night in Prohibition-era New York, where would you go and what would you wear?

Oh I’d want to go to a pansy show or a drag ball for sure. But downtown somewhere. My show is about the pansy craze which took place uptown between 1930 and 1933. And those performances were largely for a straight, white, upper and upper middle class audience. But before that through the 20's downtown it was all the riff raff of New York crowded into strange little bars.

All sorts of trouble and naughtiness. And that’s what I’d like to see. For the thrill and the joy of it. But also because those pansy acts are largely lost to time. We don’t know what they said or did. What were the songs? What were the jokes? What were the personalities? As a performer, I’m starving for that information.

What’s the most unexpected reaction you’ve had from an audience when performing a piece rooted in queer history?

Well, you know, sometimes people walk out. This is very rare in the places I work at. But it does happen. I always find that surprising. Maybe I should see it coming, but I never do. I think it happens sometimes because they like the artist I’m covering and they come thinking they’re getting a tribute show. And….surprise! It is very much not that.

When they realise what the show is….they don’t want to hear. They don’t want to know. But some people aren’t ready. Some people will never be ready. Imagine living that way. It strikes me as sad more than anything. 

Cyndi Lauper is obviously such a gay icon (my partner is obsessed with her and I'm assuming you must be too), what would you say is your favourite Cyndi moment that still gives you goosebumps?

Oh I’m obsessed. Hard to pick one moment. But I’ll go with the first time I saw her live. She was on tour with Tina Turner. (Can you imagine?!). She was pregnant. Wearing this amazing little dress. And she knelt down at the foot of the stage to play a song (on the guitar I think) and before she started the song she placed a towel across her lap and said "This is so that you don’t see the baby before I do.” I mean….COME ON. She’s the best. 

What's your favourite Cyndi album? (Mine is Into the Nightlife)

I gotta got with She’s So Unusual. How could I not?! But I love all of her stuff.

Who's your crush of the day?! I always ask everyone this ha.

My crush of the day is the Grindr hook up I had months ago that I then ran into at the grocery store yesterday. Hi Andrew if you're reading this!

This show feels ambitious and electric-how has it evolved from your first idea to what we’ll see at Soho Theatre?

This show has been years in the making. Back when I first started putting these evenings together, I was creating a new show out of a new album every single month. I was churning them out. And there was no time to be precious. There was no time for perfection. I would just make and make and make. It was exhausting and exhilarating.

The first incarnation of this show happened during that period. And it was very very different from what you’ll see at Soho. It was gay. It was about the pansy craze. All the music was in a 1930's jazz style. And that’s about all that has remained.

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My team and I have worked long hours to transform the show into a ghost story and a murder mystery and a farce with surprises all along the way. It’s completely nuts and a whirlwind to perform as well as to watch. Also it heavily features my incredible music director and arranger, Ben Langhorst, who gives a tour de force performance that you simply do not want to miss. Come!