Belvoir St Theatre, October 15
6/10
A fright wig and false eyelashes can only take you so far. From the time she clawed her way into our hearts nearly 25 years ago, Meow Meow backed up the ditsy exterior trappings in her cabaret shows with a striking singing voice and a zany, gloriously unpredictable stage persona. Meow Meow’s Red Shoes is a cat of a different colour.
She’s presented shows she’s derived from Hans Christian Andersen before, using The Little Mermaid and The Little Match Girl. If her Red Shoes, here having its premiere season, happily has no girl’s dancing feet being chopped off, it does feel like the idea was shooed into the rehearsal room with director Kate Champion while only a kitten’s foetus.
Not a play, it’s cabaret show with themes of red shoes and greed, lovingly wrapped in improbably juxtaposed songs, ranging from what I presume was her own Why Must There Be an Opening Number? to Radiohead’s No Surprises and Patrick Watson’s Here Comes a River. These are expertly performed with singer Kanen Breen, pianist Mark Jones, bassist Dan Witton and guitarist/percussionist Jethro Woodward, who also become props and characters.
Meow, of course, is the main event. To begin, she’s dragged on stage comatose: the eternal show girl, now loath to perform. Then she sings, dances, talks, improvises, climbs things, dies, eats a sandwich, dresses, undresses, pumps the bellows of a harmonium with her foot and even pinches audience members’ handbags and clothing. Yet after a while – and it only last 75 minutes – I was thinking that there was something richer and darker to be mined from The Red Shoes than this; that there’s too much surface and not enough substance.
Don’t get me wrong: her singing can still be glorious and her sheer zaniness intoxicating. In the latter regard, she’s something of a throwback to the Dada movement of a century ago, with meaning less important than surprising images and songs. But the Meow Meow who can be achingly funny was missing too often, with not much to replace it. She laments the failure of communism in its “all for one and one for all” sense, delightfully reimagines Hamlet as a Eurovision song and quizzes Andersen (Breen) about his layers meanings in The Red Shoes. Little illumination results (although the meaning of Andersen’s tale is very much in the reader’s mind).
Nothing is explicit – and that’s, no doubt, the point of the show. But here her theatrical version of chaos theory needs another layer, whether of humour or narrative, or there’s a slight feeling of the empress having in sufficient clothes (despite multiple costume changes). Perhaps Champion needed to be a more rigorous director to help distil something beyond random flights of fancy. Meow is so innately gifted, captivating and, above all, audacious, but here it’s just not quite enough.
Until November 9.
https://belvoir.com.au/productions/meow-meows-the-red-shoes/