What makes the perfect cabaret? If it's impeccable musicianship, impressive, wide-ranging vocals (in tones aural and emotional), storytelling that enthrals and entertains, skilful repartee, and a captivating physicality that brings words and music to life. . . 'Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes' is IT.
To one side of what first appears a relatively stripped back set (exposed rigging and a curtain) sits a carefully styled giant pile of. . . Well, garbage. It will come to represent much more – almost becoming an entity itself, as much as it acts as a portal for others in and out of the layered story.
Picture, if you know it, the junkyard scene from movie 'Labyrinth' after Bowie sings the aptly titled ‘As the World Falls Down’ while the (doomsday) clock tolls closer to midnight. This grungy stage aesthetic against the plush auditorium is the design team’s deceptively clever vehicle for carrying MM’s probing take on Hans Christian Andersen, and the end of the world as we know it.
With an air of the same dystopian whimsy, microphones extend from the ceiling not the floor, players burst from seemingly too-small objects, instruments are played not just with hands but also feet. A trio of ‘ruined’ pianos, their internal mechanisms lit, are used – as well as for their intended purpose – as a catwalk, a throne, dressing room walls for a quick costume change. . .
Incredibly, His Majesty’s Theatre’s large capacity is made to feel intimate – being as its split over three tiers, like a luscious red velvet cake our mesmerising headline star bursts from the centre of.
If you haven’t the pleasure of a live Meow Meow performance, you’re in expert hands with this internationally renowned persona of WAAPA alum Melissa Madden Gray. 'The Red Shoes' is the third fairy-tale adaptation by the ‘kamikaze cabaret’ goddess (think Dita Von Teese but Mad Max style, with bigger hair, sharpened wit, and pipes to rival those she’s oft compared to: Piaf, Minnelli, Dietrich).
With Meow Meow’s training and skill set (being SO much more than a triple-threat, including multi-lingual), there’s possibly no one better to have adapted this “story of the girl who wouldn’t stop dancing (or couldn’t stop)…”
Despite repeatedly proclaiming how “alone” she is, slogging up the hill of life ‘on her own’, MM throws us ‘I know you know’ glances as she’s ably accompanied by (percussion, string and wind) multi-instrumentalists The Why Why Whys. The show’s musical director among them, members are credited with co-creating the handful of original Meow Meow songs featured, also providing vocal harmonies (albeit with an occasional side of over-acting).
A rendition of a '60s Danish pop song – translated title 'I Talk To Myself' providing extra giggles for Shakespeare fans – receives thunderous applause; while a more contemporary but not heard enough Fiona Apple song, as well as 'No Surprises', are also standouts (the latter joining Tripod’s 'Paranoid Android' as this writer’s fave Radiohead covers ever)!
The movement direction of the ensemble is clearly expert (‘en pointe’ even) – from MM being ‘puppeteered’, to her wind-up doll actions, and how fellow performer Kanen Breen personifies an ‘embryo of an idea’, trying to find its feet, so to speak.
Breen’s flair for the operatic is remarkable, adeptly changing vocal styles as quick as he changes costumes, taking on multiple distinct characters as MM weaves her thoughts and tangential allegories in and out of HCA’s fairy-tale.
The character transformations are further aided by brilliant costumes, whose designer enables Kate Champion as director to bring some exceptionally memorable moments to the set, such as a plethora of red shoes simultaneously evoking a sea of blood and blood-red petals.
'Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes' is devilishly cheeky, firmly political and frequently heartfelt. In it, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale collides with modern day rejection of capitalist ideology – leaving enough tongue-in-cheek for a plug of MM’s merch of course – amid the myriad threats to our society – global (climate change, wealth-inequity) and local (arts funding, for example).
Some might note contrasting today’s real and present dangers in make-up and tulle, song and dance, makes the harsh realities of others more palatable for the production’s middle-class consumers. Surely that’s a plus, if it gets people in the door to have their ideas surreptitiously challenged? (Catching more flies with a spoonerism of sugar to help the medicine go down…?) It’s the way Jim Henson’s film taught this only child greed was not good when I was five!
“Just let me rule you and you can have everything you want” – D.Bowie (as Jareth in 'Labyrinth')
MM peels back the curtain to let us in on the Danish motto underpinning her work: Ei blot til lyst – ‘not just for pleasure’ or, 'not what you want, what you need' – the concept arts should serve a deeper purpose beyond entertainment (such as education, culture, moral reflection).
Sitting with her ‘lot’ in life, this queen of her own domain, at the apparent pinnacle of her messy world (though littered with broken dreams and signs of obsolescence), hopes it has not plateaued. Meow Meow challenges our notions of discontentment, almost as if to borrow from a much lauded comedian, despair is beneath us. The world we inhabit does not consider dancing an affront worthy of corporal punishment like HC Andersen’s after all.
But while we may not be dancing to our demise, the danger of our community’s slow and steady death by doom-scrolling – being addicted to what MM calls ‘misery porn’ – can be no better remedied than with live performance; particularly this life-affirming performance. (I for one could watch the self-described ‘humble showgirl’ lick a sandwich all day!)
Leaving this hour of ‘catharting’ (having just heard it as a verb for the first time), the audience re-enter the world buoyed by the show’s ‘fantastical optimism’ – that which challenges us can be faced. You might need sunnies to see Meow Meow’s light at the end of the tunnel, shining bright as ever. Just, whatever you do, don’t miss this megastar next time she’s in town. Eagerly awaiting the soundtrack in the meantime…!
