Meow Meow transfixes her audience with a lively tale

Little Mermaid, Meow Meow
Malthouse Theatre & Sydney Festival
Auckland Arts Festival
Spiegletent
Until March 13

Sometimes fairy tales provide an insight into the workings of the human heart and with Little Mermaid, Meow Meow uses the tale to make a very adult story about love.

The Hans Christian Anderson Little Mermaid tale is about a young mermaid willing to give up her life in the sea and her identity as a mermaid to gain a human soul.

Meow Meow seems willing to give up everything if she can meet Mr. Right – she might even settle for Mr. Wrong. She is in pursuit of happiness and in a twist to the Little Mermaid story dons a mermaid costume and a pair of flippers

She delivers a show in which she is part burlesque act, part songstress, part comic, part aerial display artist and agony aunt. Her monologue is full of feminist and non-feminist jokes, studded with double entendres and lots of fishy references to love, sex and loneliness.

In her pursuit of love, she reveals her innermost thoughts, along with her throbbing heart, heaving bosom and shapely body. The body she then shares with much of the audience as she allows herself to be crowd surfaced around the tent.

Her singing is astounding, a mix of Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf and a touch of Madonna. She can sing with silky voluptuous tones or strident earthiness providing a performance which lured the audience into her fishnets.

There was quite a lot of audience engagement. After chiding the management for not providing a bubble machine she offered one of the audience a small bottle of liquid soap and a small bubble blower and then reprimands her for not blowing enough bubble.

She got three men from the audience (don’t sit near the front or one the aisles where trawling for males occurs) to don merman suits and wigs which seemed to be a reverse approach to The Bachelor but none of them came up to scratch and were sent back to their seats.

It’s an evening of brilliantly balanced song, monologue and display, which had many of the audience as transfixed as stunned mullets.

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson on Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.