Review | Meow Meow Is Wow Wow Wow at Santa Barbara Lobero

I had absolutely no idea what to expect from Thursday’s Meow Meow show at the Lobero last week, but it was so unique and entertaining, she had me purring with surprise and delight. After a glamorous, sparkly, sequined-gowned entrance — which she did twice — providing the audience with red roses to shower her with the second time around, Meow Meow expertly set the musically eccentric tone with Laurie Anderson’s “The Dream Before” (which includes the fantastic lyrics “Hansel and Gretel are alive and well / and they’re living in Berlin / She is a cocktail waitress / He had a part in a Fassbinder film / And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin / And she says: ‘Hansel, you’re really bringing me down’ / And he says: ‘Gretel, you can really be a bitch’” ) followed by a string of gorgeously sung torch songs from the Weimar Republic, many in their original German.

Her one-of-a-kind, postmodern cabaret show — billed by presenter UCSB Arts & Lectures as Sequins and Satire, Divas and Disruptors: The Wild Women of the Weimar Republic — was a fabulous concoction of high and low culture, and equally enjoyable in both regards. Her chanteuse style musical performance was intermixed with broad comedy at every turn, including bringing my husband up onstage to do a kick line as part of a chorus of middle-aged men, doing her own smoke effects with what looked like a child’s toy, and having a crew member physically turn her around and around on stage, Lazy Susan–style, while she gamely channeled Marlene Dietrich and Lotte Lenya, with numbers from the Weimar repertoire. 

“It’s distressing to be singing these songs that are 100 years old and find them more relevant everytime I sing them,” said Meow Meow, who, though you wouldn’t know it from her impeccably rendered German, is actually an Australian-born singer, dancer, and actress named Melissa Madden Gray. Accompanied by Isaac Hayward on piano, David Berger on percussion, and Dan Witton on bass, songs by composers like Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, and Mischa Spoliansky, were skillfully served up alongside her bawdy and often absurdly silly humor mixed with serious reflections on the sorry state of our world today and frightening parallels to earlier times. 

To the murmurs of a stunned audience, she quipped, “If a nipple pops out, just pop it back in,” as she prepared them for a very, very slow stage dive into the first few rows, and then some crowd surf gymnastics on her back. She eventually landed back on stage (without any noticeable wardrobe malfunctions) to sing her way out with a pretty rendition of Patty Griffin’s “Be Careful,” going back out into the audience — this time on two feet —  to walk them out to the front of the theater Pied Piper–style, for a post-show CD signing and meet and greet. 

With a rare combination of vocal, comedic, and intellectual chops, Meow Meow is definitely a breed like no other.