The first thing to know about Meow Meow is that she really, really wants to be here. The Australian-born singer, dancer and actress—born Melissa Madden Gray—has attempted to bring her act to Myron’s since before COVID, only to see it rescheduled time and again. “The material ain’t gettin’ any younger,” she jokes. “Though it’s actually become a bit more relevant.”
That material is surprisingly tough to describe, but I’ll give it my best shot. In the broad strokes, Meow Meow is a traditional cabaret performer, in the tradition of French chansons and the Weimar Republic repertoire. She sings, she tells stories, she banters with the audience. And when she sings, which she regularly does in theatrical productions and with Portland, Oregon-based jazz orchestra Pink Martini, the room goes still and rapt. She glides elegantly through a set of originals and standards—everything from Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” to Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees.”
But that description doesn’t account for the subtle chaos that sets Meow Meow’s performance above and apart. Her stage banter can turn on a dime from basic audience call-and-response into a full-blown, hilarious discourse on subversive topics. She delights in appearing unprepared and underequipped; one of her signature flourishes is deploying her own theatrical smoke, which she applies around herself in a languid halo. It’s musical theater as cabaret performance, and it’ll be completely worth the pandemic-extended wait to see what kind of effect Vegas has on her particular kind of stage magic.
“The whole concept of Las Vegas is absolutely fascinating, because it’s a town built for the entertainment business,” she says. “Entertainment and, I guess, a degree of fantasy. It’s a parallel universe, and that’s how I live my life, so it feels like a natural fit.”
It should feel like a natural fit for Vegas, as well, though in a strange way, we had to come back around to meet Meow Meow. The lounge-centric Vegas of the past, the place that hosted Louis and Keely, the Rat Pack and Liberace, would have understood her immediately, and booked her into the Copa Room where she belongs. Vegas’ recent swing to more intimate productions—think Delilah, the gone-too-soon Miss Behave’s Mavericks and even Lady Gaga’s Jazz + Piano—is a boon to Meow Meow. This is the Las Vegas she wants to play.
“The first time I went to Vegas, I saw Liza Minnelli doing almost an out-of-town tryout for the show she was about to take [to Broadway in 2008],” she says. “It was a great experience of being in a matinee with the warmest audience in the world. And I think about how you can reach 2,000 people and still make it seem intimate, which is the special skill of all great performers of any genre, bringing that feeling of intimacy. …
“I’m a history girl. I’m very modern in my performance, but I do love the history of things. I like the mixture of jazz and experimentation that is the history of Vegas. It’s quite exciting.”
She adds that she owns a “fabulously beaded” showgirl costume (though it has “a bit more girth” in some sections than she would like, “and there’s a label inside it that reads ‘Kenny’”). She likes collecting those kinds of items, she says, because it connects her to a performance legacy to which she’s proud to align herself.
She tells a story about the time she met a relative of Gypsy Rose Lee, who likened Meow Meow to the legendary burlesque performer.
“I thought, ‘But I’ve got all my clothes on!’ And he said, ‘It’s the way that you relate to the audience.’ … She would do the very radical thing of directly addressing the audience with these fantastic monologues that were really very subversive. … I guess the subversion of entertainment is what I like. Something that gives you all the satisfaction of comedy and sexiness and beautiful music, but it’s got a little bit of subversive political edge to it as well.”
MEOW MEOW March 25, 6 & 8:30 p.m., $39-$65. Myron’s, thesmithcenter.com.
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