Life is a cabaret, old chum, and no one does cabaret quite like Meow Meow.
The Australian-born singer will perform Monday and Tuesday at the Robin Hixon Theater as part of the Norfolk Theatre Festival.
If you’re unfamiliar with Meow Meow’s work, the official blurb on the festival site offers the intriguing claim that she has “hypnotized, inspired, and terrified audiences globally.” She carries the critical acclaim to back it up, with The New Yorker naming her one of their “Top Performers of the Year” in 2010.
Delivering performances which have been called “kamikaze cabaret” — a description which Meow Meow does not dismiss — one of her typical shows is summed up in a 2014 Guardian profile:
“She staggers in late from the wrong entrance, clambers to the stage, struggles with wardrobe malfunctions and, barking and bleating, ropes punters into service as dancers, mic stands, even furniture. But this is a polished presentation of the spectacle of failure — a ruse that underlines the necessary collaboration between performer and audience and creates a shabby frame within which Meow Meow's exquisite voice can shine all the brighter.”
Meow Meow said in a Zoom interview, "It's always about giving everything you've got, I think.
“I think it's a privilege to be on stage. I hate the smallness of the screen and I really love the fleshiness of live performance, so I guess that's why I will do anything to entertain you and lift your spirits ... and it's often very, very ridiculous. I don't take myself too seriously, but I hold the music as a precious thing, and the audience relationship is a very precious thing."
Before she was Meow Meow, she was Melissa Madden Gray, a graduate of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. From 2003 to 2004, she was a cast member on the short-lived sketch comedy series “Big Bite.” Based on her startled laugh when it was brought up, it’s clear that it isn’t mentioned very often. ("Oh, that's a secret life we never talk about!") But it nonetheless had an impact on her career.
"The thing I like about that sort of comedy is that you're not stuck to a narrative, it's about, 'What is that short moment to get the maximum impact and the maximum laugh?'” she said. “But I've probably been more influenced in terms of comedy with the juxtaposition of things. I think of AbFab and French and Saunders and Lucille Ball. But then also P.G. Wodehouse. There's a bizarre mix of what I find funny. Sort of oldie-worldy. But I love a lot of physical comedy, always working on a number of levels."
A cursory search on YouTube reveals Meow Meow's musical ability to shift from the Smiths ("Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me") to Patty Griffin ("Be Careful"). Her most recent studio album, 2022’s "Mermaid," features covers of compositions by Colin Vearncombe, aka Black ("Wonderful Life"), Regina Spektor ("Après moi") and Radiohead ("Fake Plastic Trees").
"I like to sort of mix it up with the material and obviously revise it, so that, for those who know, it's familiar but somehow a new take on things," she said.
"The cabaret format means that you can really sort of change the material. You're not bound to a narrative, so you can throw all of this different music in, and it's not sort of, 'This is from the 1920s, and this is from the '90s, and this is from now.' It's just about the beauty and the poetry in the lyrics that, with good songs, lasts."
It's worth noting that Meow Meow was in the 2019 cinematic adaptation of "Cats," because with a name like that, of course, she was. The mere mention of her as Griddlebone causes her to briefly collapse into laughter.
"That is ... That is a conversation over dinner and red wine. I can't even." (She does, however, manage to acknowledge that Taylor Swift was "heaven to work with.")
A similarly unforgettable moment in her career — if perhaps for more unabashedly positive reasons — was being selected by David Bowie to perform as part of his inaugural High Line Festival in New York in 2007.
"It was insane," she recalled. "It was so surreal. I was actually stage diving, and at one point, I got sort of turned around, and someone had been pouring a martini in my mouth, but because I was on the move, it went into my eye. I don't recommend it. Don't do it! But I couldn't see anything, and with burning martini tears, audiences were holding each footstep, placing my feet because I couldn't see anything. It felt like this transcendent performance. It was sort of a semireligious experience."
Meow Meow also has a back catalog of work in the theater that has found her doing Shakespeare (“A Midsummer Night's Dream”) while also taking part in a production of the Tom Waits / William S. Burroughs collaboration “The Black Rider.”
"Shakespeare is the ultimate. It's all there. All the human emotions. The passion, the torture, the confusion, the existential crises, the dire, base jealousy, revenge ... It's so profoundly there. The same emotions still grip us all; it's just that now we've got weapons of mass destruction, and that's terrifying. I wish we could battle it out just as troubadours!"
Meow Meow's performances are at 7:30, March 30 and 31 at the Robin Hixon Theater, Clay & Jay Barr Education Center, 440 Bank St., Norfolk.
Visit vafest.org for tickets and more information.
