Cover Image: Meow Meow in The Red Shoes. Photo: Brett Boardman

The Red Shoes – by Meow Meow
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth Festival
Thursday, 26th February

The WAAPA-trained cabaret star draws blood and big laughs as she completes her trilogy inspired by the fairytales tales of Hans Christian Anderson. Mark Naglazas reviews her madcap but meaningful Perth Festival show.

Anyone whose knowledge of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Red Shoes comes from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s lush 1949 dance drama should cast aside all expectations when settling into His Majesty’s Theatre for Meow Meow’s loopy update.

Set in a post-apocalyptic landscape with a huge pile of junk to one side and (in the opening) three ancient upright pianos to the other, Meow Meow and her director Kate Champion  reimagine and deconstruct Anderson’s story of a little girl who is punished for her shoe fetish by being made to endlessly dance into a critique of society’s drive for endless action and consumption, a plea for us to slow down embrace beauty and community and a celebration of artistic obsession and love.

But, this being the bigger-than-life WAAPA-trained cabaret sensation otherwise known as Melissa Madden Gray, The Red Shoes is far from didactic. Indeed, you have to do a bit of work to make sense of the ideas, jokes and fourth wall-breaking asides that come at you non-stop during its breakneck hour and fifteen minutes run time (late on opening night Meow Meow got a big laugh she asked the exhausted and exhilarated audience, “Second act?”).

This co-production between Perth’s Black Swan Theatre Company, Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre begins hilariously with the glamorous Meow Meow not dancing on to the stage, as you might expect from a show called The Red Shoes, but dragged into the spotlight by one the three musicians who had kicked off proceedings by playing three upright pianos from every angle.

Before the story begins with a red shoe falling from the heavens — just one, amusingly, forcing her to scramble through the junk pile looking for a matching pair — Meow Meow reflects on the struggle of putting on a show when she and the world are exhausted on the brink of collapse. 

She even gives us a hint that her take on Anderson’s tale was created during COVID with a remark about how the pandemic derailed her career, with the heap of detritus representing her mind which she spent way too much time inside of during lockdown along with the rest of humanity. There’s even an old fridge stuffed with packages delivered from Amazon.

Later a barely formed man crawls out of the fridge (a superb Kanen Breen) who turns out to be “an embryo of an idea” that she was working on (during COVID?) and discarded. Anderson’s fairy tale provides the structure but The Red Shoes is as much about the struggles of being an artist in a world filled with junk, of finding equilibrium and connection when she is driven to keep moving and keep entertaining.

The pile of junk — Dann Barber’s set is a real eye-popper — recalls Samuel Beckett’s 1961 masterpiece Happy Days, in which a woman named Winnie is stuck waist-deep in a very similar pile, a work that was (tellingly) revived in London by Trevor Nunn in the wake of COVID, with reviews noting how pertinent it was.

Indeed, Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes could best be described as Beckett by way of Brecht, with absurdist behaviour of all the characters and the eclectic mix of songs — several co-written by Meow Meow along with numbers from Amanda Palmer, Fiona Apple, Feist, Radiohead and Paul Anka — both surprising and politically charged.

While the cultural references abound — there is even a bit about German Marxist author Walter Benjamin that I will be definitely looking up — this third of Meow Meow’s Anderson trilogy after Little Matchstick Girl and Little Mermaid is all about Meow Meow herself, with everything channelled through her persona and sensibility of this volcanic talent, who changes gears more imperceptibly than an electric car.

Meow Meow’s best “It’s all about me” Dame Edna-ish down-on-her luck global superstar moment came when she wandered into the audience and borrowed/pilfered the bags of surprised and amused audience members, making a special point of snaffling up those that matched her red shoes. 

It is just a throwaway gag in a nutty cabaret show, but the sight of this narcissistic showgirl strolling through the audience and taking what she wants may be the funniest, most devastating snapshot of the age of Trump, whose hair would be a perfect match for Meow Meow’s shoes and whose wife Melania pocketed $40 million from Amazon for a gilded cinematic accessory that her husband is celebrating as if it was Citizen Kane.

Meow Meow’s lunacy is Perth’s Festival sanest, most necessary show.

The Red Shoes is showing with Perth Festival until 1 March.

For more information and tickets, visit: https://www.perthfestival.com.au/program/season-2026/meow-meows-the-red-shoes