Meow Meow, with Lance Horne on piano - New York City Article

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, “Meow Meow” is the performance persona of Melissa Madden Gray, an Australian singer and actress who, as Meow Meow, is one of the primary figures in what New Yorkers call “Alt Cabaret” but what most of the rest of the English-speaking world calls just plain “cabaret.” The Meow Meow character is an internationally-celebrated sacred monster of a diva, yet a highly dysfunctional one, who alights the stage wearing a raggedy tutu, a single frayed opera glove, and holding not one but two half-smoked cigarettes - and, oh yes, largely covered in police tape. (“International boundaries are not as easy to to cross as they used to be,” she informs us.) Along the way, she bickers comically with her musical director (the formidable Lance Horne - when he he puts his Emmy award on the piano, she mumbles under her breath, “daytime”), is constantly getting the wrong lighting from the tech crew, and makes all sorts of bizarre demands from the audience - like positioning young men on stage (“the sacred space”) with disco balls and flashlights. All this interaction shtick with the crowd is not only funny in and of itself, but helps make her songs (like the very touching “One For Sorrow”) seem all the more poignant. For all the outrageousness of her character - she often seems like a postnuclear Sally Bowles - her singing is extremely subtle, more intimate than oversized, and her material is mostly high class cabaret fare, like Brecht and Weill. “Pirate Jenny,” which must be a kind of a national anthem in Joe’s Pub, is downright bone chilling, especially in German.