Review: MONICA SALVI: SPIRITS IN MY CLOSET, Stage Door Theatre

With cabaret, sometimes it isn't about the singer, or the song, but the singer singing the song while bouncing a drumstick off a trio of skulls. Perfectly timed for Halloween, Monica Salvi’s Spirits In My Closet is a witch’s brew containing personal stories and the supernatural musings interspersed with songs written by Tori Amos, Randy Newman and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

As with any good campfire ghost story, the initial setting is shrouded in the mundane and, on closer inspection, the mysterious. And when I say shrouded, I’m being literal: the set is covered in white drapes with little to see before the Italian performer, playing the role of Madame Monique Mystique, takes to the stage accompanied by keyboard player and backing vocalist Monsieur Cadavre (Michael Ferreri).

This isn’t the ex-Royal Academy of Music’s first spooky rodeo. In her Mad Women In My Attic show, she portrayed a woman driven insane by literature’s ill-treatment of women. Only able to express herself in the limited tropes allocated to her heroines, she was by turns seductive, murderous, grief-stricken and broken-hearted as she drew on a broad range of musical inspirations including arch-satirists Tom Lehrer, cabaret godfathers Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brech, and maestro Andrew Lloyd Webber. 

In this latest outing (again directed by Clare McKenna), she slowly peels away the drapes bit by bit to reveal inner-lit skulls, evocative paintings and unusual musical instruments. Her narrative wanders from tales of the paranormal and to stories from her childhood in Milan onwards. There’s all of that plus 18 songs to pack in so it’s unsurprising that Spirits stretches to around two hours (including an interval). This is something of a gamble considering that her last effort rattled in around the 75-minute mark, so is there entertainment here to justify the running time?

Part of the fun of Salvi’s show is never knowing what comes next. She never pulls an actual rabbit out of a hat but it wouldn’t have been a shocker if she did considering the breadth of the mystical topics she raises. Ghosts, ghouls and those that go hump in the night inspire such as The Haunted Mansion theme "Grim Grinning Ghosts (The Screaming Song)", the calypso-flavoured “Zombie Jamboree” made famous in the 1960s by Harry Belafonte and Bill Rozar’s lively “Witches In Bikinis”.

There are a few too many songs here but, if she is to wield the knife on future iterations of this production, I would suggest she keep two in particular. “The Ghosts of Sleep Paralysis” takes the title song from Lloyd Webber's Phantom Of The Opera and adds a wicked twist to it that could have come straight from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe. Her penultimate number is "Happy Phantom", a spell-binding hit from that the Nineties which married sublime lyrics to a jaunty pop melody that Kate Bush would have run up a thousand hills for. Salvi’s interpretation of this Tori Amos hit throws in dramatic costuming and sparky dancing to produce a palpable sense of emotional closure.

Spirits In The Closet could do with some trimming but it has all the ingredients for a spectacular Halloween show. When it comes to the detailed staging and powerful delivery, this is one of the best musical cabaret shows of the year. 

Photo credit: Jamie Heart

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