Sydney Reviews

A pile of junk.

The striking set of Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes presents a mountain of trash towering into a corner of the stage, litres of litter on an incline, a ladder leading up, with a fridge smack dab in the middle. It’s an image evoking Samuel Beckett rather than Hans Christian Andersen.

Then three tail-coated, chalk faced chaps front the audience with the declamatory introduction “... the one, the only Meow Meow!” Only a pair of dismembered mannequin’s legs present, causing the trio to flurry into a surmised Plan B. 

Pianist envy is triggered with the formally frocked fellows choreographing a trio of claviers on stage, performing acrobatic accompaniment on their keyboards as Meow Meow finally enters the fray.

Initial inertia blazes into an exuberant crazy kamikaze cabaret, a loose rendering and deconstruction of Hans Christian Andersen’s so called fairy tale.

Meow Meow scales the dump in search of red shoes, opening the fridge from which a figure emerges, Rocky Horror like, crooning Paul Anka’s You Are My Destiny.  

It’s enough to cut one’s diction off.

The three musicians, Mark Jones, Dan Witton and Jethro Woodward, fuel this frenzied fantasia with an assortment of instruments, percussive and stringed, their attire of tails acquiring accoutrements that are all tutu much!

Kanen Breen, impressive as the fridge creature returns as a horned feature evoked by Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, impressive in voice and physical presence.

And Meow Meow of course dominates in prominent eye lashes and tongue lashings, fishnet tights and fantastic frou frou, determined to break the fourth wall at every opportunity, singing, evoking, communicating, symbol and individual fusing in passionate theatrical mating.

Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes is Spiegeltent packed up and erected on the cavernous Belvoir stage. Out of the tent, the show loses some intensity, certainly intimacy, that even the larcenous audience participation can’t quite quell.