I couldn’t hear exactly what the admiring male audience member called out to Emilie Autumn at the Murray Theater last night, but it sounded a bit like, “I want to fuck you.”

Her response, like all her statements during the two-and-half-hour performance, was timed for maximum effect. “Are you drunk?” she asked the crowd. “OK, just wondering. Because someone out there seems to think I like boys.”

It wasn’t the last comment she would make about alcohol during the Salt Lake City stop on her Asylum Tour, and it was far from the last time she would refer to girl-on-girl action.

Emilie wore her trademarked fuchsia hair ratted, and went through several costume changes, but always included combat boots, a corset, and something sparkly, and always stuck with a pink-and-white color scheme.

Her partners on the stage were her four “Bloody Crumpets.” Like their leader, they each showed an affinity for striped stockings and corsets, but each had a distinct personality of her own. 

The raven-haired Naughty Veronica had a talent for burlesque. The blond Aprella, it was claimed, was a murderous doll who could shoot a man from 60 miles away. Miss Maggots wore fluorescent orange hair and calls herself a pirate captain. And the brunette Blessed Contessa was purported to be a cannibal. Any one of them could be a model (and some are) and any one could be a front person in her own right.

The interplay between Emilie and Veronica was particularly charged. Emilie announced that she was miffed to have caught Veronica making out with the other girls instead of her. At one point, she rode Veronica like a pony. And of course, there was the introduction of The Rat Game.

It began with Veronica begging to be allowed to play Emilie’s harpsichord, which was elaborately decorated with plastic rats, skeletons, dolls, candles, and other things one might associate with a Victorian insane asylum, and hung with signs that said “Beware of Escaped Inmates,” “Lunatics!” and “Whores!” 

Veronica asked whether she could play The Rat Game if she played very, very well, and Emilie agreed, but added that she knew Veronica wouldn’t play very, very well. But of course, Veronica played amazingly well, and Emilie had to let her play The Rat Game.

The Rat Game, we learned, involved picking out a girl from the crowd who was at least 18 and had never kissed a girl but wanted to kiss Veronica. Once a suitable (and adorable) subject was located and brought to the stage, Veronica curled her hands against her chest like a rat and scooted forward across the stage for her kiss.

The entire evening seemed designed to let the audience experience a Victorian home for wayward girls…in the most glamorous light possible. The intricate set was dominated by what looked like an enormous stone clock with Roman numbers. Instead of hands, its center was made of a translucent material that allowed light to shine through it. This let it serve either as a shadowbox for the ladies who walked behind it, or as a frame for those who cavorted in front of it. Piles of tea cups and dolls peeped out from various corners of the stage.

As promised, there was a period where Contessa and the Cap’n poured “tea” and spat it at the audience as they hurled muffins into the crowd. I don’t know exactly what was in this “tea,” but at one point Emilie did say that she and the Bloody Crumpets drink more on stage “than you do in this whole state.”

All the antics were interspersed by songs, of course. The most theatrical was “Dead is the New Alive,” which included Emilie twirling ribbons and Captain Maggots entering on stilts before shimmying with a flaming hula hoop that the Contessa used for fire-eating.

Watch this video clip of them giving this performance in Belgium earlier this year, and you’ll get a good idea of what it was like.

While the ladies did perform to a backing track, there was no shortage of musical talent on stage. Autumn’s harpsichord playing at the beginning of “Shalott” was impressively fast, and during an encore, she gave a solo violin performance so wildly intricate and that it would put a heavy metal lead guitarist to shame. Particularly lovely, too, was the five-part harmony as the ladies sang Emilie’s interpretation of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Before bidding goodbye to her “Plague Rats,” as Emilie calls her audience, she held court on the importance of accepting everyone’s differences, and proposed marriage to all her crumpets, who joined hands with her in solidarity.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone display such ability to remake a world in her own image. I’ve got the strangest urge to wear stripes today.