Mar 1, 2016 Theatre
Meow Meow’s cabaret riffs gleefully on The Little Mermaid.
It’s so hard to find love, isn’t it? Even, apparently, if you’re the almost ridiculously glamorous, preposterously talented Meow Meow.
The festival programme calls this Australian cabaret star “sexy post-postmodern”; she herself, onstage in Sydney in January, prefers “postmodern feminist”.
She’s a mermaid, see, and the show riffs with gleeful abandon on the Little Mermaid story. There’s a bit of Hans Christian Andersen in there, but very little Disney.
She despairs of love. She gets herself lost at sea, emotionally, and sings like a siren with the intensity of a foghorn (this is praise, by the way), and clambers about having great fun at the expense of a few hapless members of the audience. Don’t worry: she chooses men, and they love it, secretly. There’s a live band, which drives the show with enthusiastic abandon, and there is more sexual innuendo than there are fish in the sea.
Does it work? You bet. Meow Meow can really sing. She’s part winsome, part raunchy — the very epitome of cute — and she’s also slyly, subversively funny. Nobody, after all, moans about finding love unless they’ve got something fairly political to say about sex.
She is also, I hasten to add, in-your-face funny. She screams and you pretty much do, too.
Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid, Spiegeltent, Aotea Square, March 9-13.
