Review: In ‘Why’d Ya Do It,’ a Spiky Séance With Marianne Faithfull

There are comeback albums, and then there is Marianne Faithfull’s “Broken English.”

When it came out in 1979, “Broken English” marked more than Ms. Faithfull’s return to pop and rock after a dozen years lost to drug addiction and homelessness: It illustrated a radical metamorphosis, from the party-happy Swinging London aristocrat of the mid-1960s to a gravel-voiced, noir truth-sayer.

Now, the downtown rock raconteuse Tammy Faye Starlite is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the album — “my magnum opus, my gesamtkunstwerk,” she says, narrating the show as Ms. Faithfull — in “Why’d Ya Do It,” a hybrid of séance, lecture and concert.

Music nerds will delight in the wealth of inside references and jokes, as when Ms. Starlite refers to 1979 as the moment before Reagan, MS-DOS, acid wash “and Don Henley’s solo career.” There is even a living connection to “Broken English” onstage: The guitarist Barry Reynolds, who helped write and played on parts of the album, is in the five-piece backing band.

At the Wednesday performance, Lenny Kaye, Patti Smith’s longtime guitarist, opened the evening with Ms. Smith’s “Ghost Dance” — which Ms. Faithfull covered.

But the evening is not reserved to subscribers to the record-collecting magazine “Goldmine,” and those new to Ms. Faithfull’s universe will learn a thing or 10.

Some of the stories Ms. Starlite tells — on Thursdays through October at the intimate Pangea — sound so nutty that at the end of the evening, a friend asked me whether they were true. Yes, Ms. Faithfull really is related to the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose work inspired the term “masochism.” Yes, the Rolling Stones’ manager did decide to propel her into the pop-star orbit after seeing her at a party in 1964. Yes, she did play Lilith in Kenneth Anger’s cult film “Lucifer Rising.”

And, yes, the brutally graphic song “Why’d Ya Do It,” the dark star that concludes “Broken English,” was originally intended for Tina Turner.

Ms. Starlite is intimately acquainted with Ms. Faithfull’s life and work, having honored it in her earlier shows “Cabaret Marianne” and “Faithfull: Exposed.” The new piece is a bit more structured as she performs the entire album in order, and the anecdotes and digressions are scripted. You can easily imagine “Why’d Ya Do It” as an audio entry in the 33 1/3 book series about classic albums.

The show, directed by Michael Schiralli, slacks when Ms. Starlite gets bogged down by too many quotes. (Bob Dylan, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Blake, George Eliot and especially Bertolt Brecht are among those summoned to help frame the British singer as a member of an international band of audacious explorers of the human psyche.) Her own witty insights are more convincing, as when she describes the title character of “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” as “coming from somewhere untouched by second-wave feminism, somewhere like Colonial Williamsburg.”

Ms. Starlite, who narrates as Ms. Faithfull, can sound weirdly reminiscent of Nico (the subject of a 2014 show) when she speaks, but her mastery of Ms. Faithfull’s singing voice is extraordinary, down to the tremolo that punctuates some words like a stifled sob. She never ventures into ironic commentary on the performance itself, as John Kelly’s take on Joni Mitchell, loving as it is, could sometimes be.

As for the song that gives the show its title, Ms. Starlite gives it all the spite and bile it requires. No footnotes are needed.

Why’d Ya Do It: Tammy Faye Starlite Performs Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English
Through Oct. 31 at Pangea, Manhattan; 212-995-0900, pangeanyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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