Meow Meow evaluate – kamikaze cabaret combines clownish comedy and crooning

‘I do think in 90 mins,” says the kamikaze cabaret performer Meow Meow, “we can really make a difference.” It’s a funny story, obviously: within the face of encroaching tyranny and freedoms far and wide circumscribed, this blithering and kooky diva turns out not going to be a lot use. It’s all she will be able to do to get her display began, wheeling a piano effortfully onstage, replaying the whoops and cheers of bygone gigs and glories on a feeble Walkman. And but, through the top of It’s Come to This, Meow Meow – AKA Melissa Madden Gray – turns out truly to need to ask: what, in such ominous instances, must the artist do?

You can see why the query would possibly fear her, engaged as she is with the songs of the Weimar generation (Brecht and Weill’s Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife will get an time out right here). Elsewhere, our big-haired, boundaries-free host twins chanson with clownish comedy in distinctive aggregate, now crooning Jacques Brel, now crawling cleavage-first over the shoulders of her crowd. As target market participants are press-ganged on degree to fondle and manhandle its celebrity, the display (with piano through Ben Dawson) can appear to be an experiment to peer how battily you’ll behave earlier than the tune you’re making a song is eclipsed solely.

The solution is: rather so much, in case your voice is as ravishing an software as Meow Meow. Occasionally, the shtick subsides and we get to truly savour it. Equally ceaselessly, that voice seeks consideration for itself on the expense of the tune. Latterly, the display devolves into worrisome political inquiry, as our host frets about the upward thrust of nazism and Walter Benjamin’s ideas at the angel of historical past. Knowing what we all know of the 1930s, what must we do now equivalent hurricane clouds are collecting? Her phrases “I don’t know” resounding like a siren, Meow Meow raises the alarm, however provides few solutions.