A well-designed programme with much time devoted to the true masters of cabaret.

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide
July 6-8.

Weimar cabaret chanteuse, the sultry Meow Meow needs little introduction. Such has been the level of success that her shows for the Fringe and cabaret festivals, with Barry Humphries and the acclaimed Australian Chamber Orchestra have brought her. This group of ongoing performances immediately placing her amongst the finest interpreters that we have witnessed in this biting, satirical repertoire – Ute Lemper, Robyn Archer and Marianne Faithfull (Now wouldn’t she be a great choice for a Cabaret festival artist?).

From the moment that she strode onstage to sing that seductive Kurt Weill tango Youkali, she immediately had the audience in the palm of her hand. Although, there was an individual dissenter complaining about the fact that so much of this repertoire was delivered in German and other languages rather than English. Miss Meow Meow immediately apologised and promised, rather laconically and without missing a beat, that she would present the rest of the programme in Mandarin, no less! (Mind you, it had been all-too-clearly noted in the festival programme that this show would be performed mainly in the languages in which they were originally written.

Here was a well-designed programme with much time devoted to the true masters of this social critical idiom: Brecht and Weill together with Eisler, Spoliansky and others, written and performed at a very short period of time where nothing mattered and all was permissible.

As well as the tale of the dirty rat of a sailor with a gal in every port who inhabits every port (Surabaya Johnny), and Brecht’s tale of revenge where none is spared (Pirate Jenny), we were also treated to Marlene’s Mischa Spoliansky and his hilariously funny Life’s a Swindle not to mention Schulhoff’s Sonata Erotica – a solo work for voice which nudgingly pre-empts the work of the late diva Cathy Berberian. Accompanied by a very small band of multi-instrumentalists (a mere two who not only play and understand the field of cabaret as well as their headliner’ they also swap between keyboards and strings most effortlessly. This is cabaret of the highest order and, like the best in the genre, the delightful Meow Meow not only knows how to word paint and truly inhabit a satirical lyric; uniquely she seems to play with her audience as her name-sake would with a captive mouse, yet with an unknowing wink firmly fixed upon her face.

To prove that this was not a show stuck firmly in Thirties Berlin, as part of her encore, an example of her own writing skills was presented as was, and perhaps even more appropriately, Laurie Anderson’s grim update on Hansel and Gretel, The Dream Before.