Meow Meow: The Courier Mail 04 06 2016 QWeekend

ARTS
PHIL BROWN
I’m rather partial to a spot of Elizabethan
music. Which is why I was excited to hear
about Shakespeare’s Songs, an afternoon of
Elizabethan music at Brisbane’s University
of Queensland Art Museum, next Sunday
from 1pm to 4pm. This small concert will
feature Baroque music specialists the
Badinerie Players with soprano Edit
Molnar. Professor Tom Bishop, of the
University of Auckland, author of
Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), will
give a pre-concert lecture.
This is all part of ongoing celebrations
at UQ marking the 400th anniversary of
The Bard’s death. We hear a lot about the
plays but not much about the music.
Queensland Theatre Company’s recent
production of Much Ado About Nothing
included music – some quasi-Elizabethan,
some contemporary – because Shakespeare
lived in a golden age of English music, an
important part of staging his plays. We
don’t know much about what was played
and sung, but Shakespeare did leave clues
in his texts and the Badinerie Players will
present a program that might well have
accompanied performances of his plays. It
encompasses the end of the Early Music
period and the beginning of the Baroque.
I have a particular fondness for
madrigals. A madrigal is a secular vocal
composition, usually a partsong (a choral
form for several voices) of the Renaissance
and early Baroque era. These traditionally
polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied
and the number of voices varies from two
to eight, most frequently from three to six.
My interest in madrigals was rekindled
thanks to Sting and his 2008 concert at
Brisbane City Hall, accompanied by
Bosnian-born lutenist Edin Karamazov.
They focused on the music and madrigals
of John Dowland, a contemporary of
Shakespeare, who was born the year after
The Bard but lived until 1626, a decade
longer than the playwright.
I sat close to the front at Sting’s gig and
was transfixed. I got a copy of his 2006 CD,
Songs From the Labyrinth, and bought
another CD of Dowland’s music and both
have been on high rotation ever since.
Recently, I topped up with a double CD
collection of Italian and English madrigals.
The Italians invented the form but it’s the
English madrigals that really rock my boat.
It’s the simplicity, emotion and poetry that
get to me and Dowland is the master. I am
eternally grateful to Sting for turning me
on to Dowland’s music.
Don’t miss Phil Brown’s arts coverage weekdays
on The Courier-Mail website
30
THE CAT’S
WHISKERS
BEHIND THE BRAVADO OF DIVA MEOW MEOW IS THE MORE MEASURED
MELISSA MADDEN GRAY, ALWAYS STRIVING TO FIND HER ‘SACRED SPACE’
BELINDA SEENEY
I
t’s Meow Meow who answers the phone.
Ensconced in her “lovely little flat in Covent
Garden which is quite heaven”, she is apologising effusively for missing an earlier call.
“I’ve got my caffeine now, it was going to be
disastrous without,” she explains theatrically.
“I might be a bit speedy, but that’s all right.”
The self-described “kamikaze cabaret” queen is
about to “traipse down to Brighton” to perform a
solo spiegeltent show on her day off.
She’s based in London until September, playing
the role of fairy queen Titania in a reimagining of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The
Globe Theatre. “Hence my semi-hysteria,” she
laughs. “It is a really massive production and we had
two shows yesterday.
“The theatre stage is made of very thick oak
wood and, coming from a dance background, you
look at the floor and think, oh, that will be lovely and
springy, so I put a lot of fairy springs and jumps in
and now I’m paying the price for the relentless oak
of the boards of The Globe.”
Meow Meow barely pauses for breath as she
skips along, but as the interview progresses, the
brassy bravado synonymous with the raucous
cabaret entertainer fades and I find myself speaking
with Melissa Madden Gray.
The whip-smart Australian entertainer beneath
Meow Meow’s tousled black wig, signature red lips
and dramatic eyeliner holds dual degrees from the
University of Melbourne in law and arts, majoring in
German and fine arts. She studied at the renowned
West Australian Academy of Performing Arts
(WAAPA), trained in ballet and opera and has
performed with Opera Australia and the London
Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and
Australian Chamber orchestras.
Gray takes leave from Midsummer next
month to jet back home for a concentrated run
of performances at Hobart’s Theatre Royal
Festival of Voices and Noosa Long Weekend
Festival. This year marks Meow Meow’s third
appearance at the annual Sunshine Coast event
with its “boutique feel” and receptive audiences
luring Gray back. “Rapturous response from the
audience, of course, what could they do?” Gray
jokes about her past two appearances, seamlessly
slipping back into her alter ego.
Longtime collaborators, Australian composer
Iain Grandage and multi-instrumentalist Dan
Witton, are helping her craft a new show, Up
Close and Personal with Meow Meow, for this
year’s NLWF.
She promises her signature blend of “finely
orchestrated chaos” with new songs and reworked favourites and hints that Titania
Meow Meow
(opposite page),
performance alter
ego of Melissa
Madden Gray
(below). Picture:
Hollie Adams
may gate-crash the production. “I guess the beauty
of Noosa is that it is just the three of us, and I know
the crew at The J Theatre – and they know me – so
they’re not going to be shocked by my raucous
goings on, on stage,” Gray explains. “To just get on
that stage in that intimate cabaret format and sing
my head off is very good for my soul.”
While Meow Meow has been described by The
New York Post as “a cabaret diva of the highest
order”, Gray is disciplined, focused and often has
multiple creative projects on the boil.
“I often say crowd-surfing is my most frequent
style of recreational resting,” she quips, referencing
Meow Meow’s predilection for audience involvement and immersion.
“It’s borderline – if you work too hard you’re not
productive, so it’s all about trying to find the balance.
“It’s a tightrope. If I stop completely, I really do
fall apart, which is why Noosa is so good for me – you
really can’t help but be affected by that extraordinary natural environment. It’s quite healing.”
As prepared and professional as Gray is, performances occasionally go awry, especially given the
prevailing audience participation and interaction
synonymous with Meow Meow’s shows.
“You want it to be brilliant offstage, so you can be
most heightened onstage. I’m a perfectionist, even
though a lot of my shows deal with disaster,” she
laughs, espousing the values of flexibility and fastthinking.
Gray, who won a Helpmann Award in 2012 for
her show Little Match Girl, debuted the second
fractured fairytale in Meow Meow’s “Little” series,
Little Mermaid, in January, and hopes to bring that
to Brisbane once she packs away Titania’s fairy
wings.
“I joke about ‘the sacred space’ in my shows, but
I do feel passionately about the theatre and
performance as a sacred thing.
“As much as I’m wild and rambunctious on
stage, it’s all about the sweatiness and the realness
of humans and trying to put that into songs or
poetry or something physical.
“That’s why I do such physical performances; I’m trying to get to the soul of
things.”
Or, as Meow Meow purrs: “We’re
all there in the darkness together –
it’s just exciting.”
Up Close and Personal With Meow
Meow opens the Noosa Long
Weekend Festival at The J
Theatre, July 15, 7pm &
9.30pm; Noosa Long
Weekend, July 15-24,
noosalongweekend.com
BCME01Z01QW - V1
STAGE
IF YOU WORK
TOO HARD
YOU’RE NOT
PRODUCTIVE,
SO IT’S ALL
ABOUT TRYING
TO FIND THE
BALANCE … IF
I STOP, I FALL
APART
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THIS WEEKEND
Little Shop of Horrors
Saturday 2pm & 8pm
Sunday 2pm
QB’s Strictly Gershwin
Saturday 1.30pm &
7.30pm
QSO Long Live the Bard 400 Years
Saturday 11.30am
COMING SOON
V1 - BCME01Z01QW
7 Jun QSO Lang Lang
7 Jun - 3 Jul Carl Barron - Drinking
with a Fork
9 Jun Megan Hilty
10 Jun Ms Lisa Fischer and Grand
Baton
11 Jun The Laughing Samoans Island Time
12-19 Jun Wuthering Heights
13 Jun Patrizio Buanne
16 Jun Michael Jackson HIStory
17 & 18 Jun The Pink Floyd
Experience
19 Jun SxS Visions of Earth
21-28 Jun OOTB Festival for
Children Eight Years and Under
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