Regina Spektor review – kinks, squeaks and Trump-baiting theatrics

‘I used to think calling me ‘quirky’ was a clever way of keeping down anything creative and adventurous. But if a guy is the way I am, he’s a ‘visionary’,” Regina Spektor told the Guardian on the release of current album Remember Us to Life. She has a point – when was the last time David Byrne or Devendra Banhart, who can be equally whimsical, were tarred with the Q word?

Yet it’s fair to say that the classically trained Russian New Yorker pianist and singer heaps on the fanciful trimmings with a relish that makes her male counterparts seem conventional. Tonight she enforces the rule that there’s no such thing as too much theatricality, rolling her Rs with relish during the Russian-language verses of Après Moi, and adding helium-squeak high notes to the choruses of Bleeding Heart.

But in context it makes sense. Where most songwriters inhabit their songs, Spektor has a set of fictional characters inhabiting most of hers, and she acts out their stories. Sometimes though, like a film director who can’t resist making a cameo in his or her own movie, she slots herself into songs. On Bobbing for Apples, the set’s least embellished number, she straps on a guitar and delivers its payoff line – “Someone next door’s fucking to one of my songs” – with a kind of fierce pride.

Adding texture with a drummer, keyboardist, cellist and her own piano, she pulls each five-minute drama into richly adorned focus. One of the strongest is a freak-disco version of You’ve Got Time, her theme tune for Orange Is the New Black. Some of tonight’s crowd probably first encountered her through that one – it certainly gets a fevered reception. But like fellow travellers Tori Amos and Joanna Newsom, she attracts fans who keep the faith for ever; this is the first gig I’ve been to in years where almost everyone is watching rather than filming.

There are ruminative moments. She follows a rollicking The Calculation by noting the link between a “pussy-grabbing president” and the satellite channel Movies4Men. And on The Call, from the Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian soundtrack – one of her prettiest film songs – she glides into adult-contemporary terrain. The latter shows that she can play it straight if she wants to, but anyone can play it straight – it is Spektor’s kinks that make her compelling.

• At Sheffield City Hall, 1 August. Box office: 0114-278 9789. Then touring until 9 August.