SUNDAY, MARCH 10, 2024 • 5 PM & 7:30 PM

MEOW MEOW

Post-post-modern diva Meow Meow has hypnotised, inspired, and terrified audiences globally with unique creations and sell-out seasons from New York’s Lincoln Center and Berlin’s Bar Jeder Vernunft to London’s West End and the Sydney Opera House.
Named one of the Top Performers of the Year by The New Yorker, the crowd-surfing artist has been called “sensational” (The Times, UK), a “diva of the highest order” (New York Post), “The Queen of Chanson” (Berliner Zeitung), and “a phenomenon” by the Australian press. Her award-winning works have been curated by David Bowie, Pina Bausch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and numerous international arts festivals.

Meow Meow’s original works include Vamp, Beyond Glamour, Feline Intimate, Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl, Meow Meow’s Little Mermaid, His Master’s Choice, Apocalypse Meow, and An Audience with Meow Meow. These shows have played from Edinburgh International Festival to Berkeley Rep, from the Southbank Centre to the Sydney Festival and Shakespeare’s Globe, and from Shanghai to Slovenia and most recently the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). They have garnered numerous awards including the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Award, Green Room, and Australian Helpmann Awards. Meow’s Pandemonium and More Pandemonium “orchestrated chaos” concerts have played Royal Festival Hall with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Bergen Festival with the Bergen Philharmonic, Norway and most recently New Year’s Eve at Seattle Symphony and with the Western Australian Symphony for Perth International Arts Festival 2020.

Meow Meow’s work extends to large-scale events. She conjured a bespoke civic creation for Liverpool Culture’s “Sgt. Pepper at Fifty” celebrations involving the city’s brass bands, a three-day “riot,” a multi-media installation in an oratory, and a requiem in a graveyard. She created fantastical multimedia song cycles for the Brighton Festival UK, the Theatre Royal Tasmania and Her Majesty’s Theatre South Australia with composers Jherek Bischoff, August Von Trapp, Jethro Woodward and designer Andrea Lauer. In Australia, Meow has a long-standing creative relationship with Malthouse Theatre and the nation’s international arts festivals and orchestras.

As well as being a prolific original music and theatre creator, Meow Meow specializes in the Weimar repertoire and French chanson. She has played Jenny in Brecht/Weill’s Threepenny Opera in Paris and London with the London Philharmonic and Anna 1 and 2 in Brecht/Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins with Orchestra Victoria, and with United Ensemble at the Konzerthaus Berlin, as well as numerous Weimar works with Sydney Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Seattle Symphony, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra and the Bergen Philharmonic. Meow Meow has performed Schoenberg Ensemble founder Reinbert de Leeuw’s homage to Schubert and Schumann, Wunderschön, throughout Australia and in the UK with the Hebrides Ensemble. She is a guest artist with Pina Bausch Tanztheater and has performed with them in Wuppertal, Berlin and Moscow.

In other works, Meow has played Titania in Emma Rice’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe and appeared on the West End in Kneehigh and Michel Legrand’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in a role created especially for her, La Maîtresse. She played Pegleg in Tom Waits’ musical fable The Black Rider with Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre; and Édith Piaf in Cocteau’s Le Bel indifferent for the Greenwich Music Festival. Richard Mills created an opera for her.

Highlights of recent seasons include Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls at Royal Albert Hall with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Sitwell/Walton’s Façade at the Berlin Konzerthaus, conducted by Vladimir Jurowski; concerts at Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Series, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and an extended run of concerts at the Barbican London with the late Barry Humphries and the Aurora Orchestra. That program, a highly-acclaimed return season, resurrected lost and banned works from the Weimar period. Meow Meow and Humphries premiered this program in the major concert halls of Australia including the Sydney Opera House, and then toured it to Tanglewood Music Festival, London’s Cadogan Hall, and the Edinburgh International Festival with the Australian Chamber Orchestra lead by Richard Tognetti.

Meow Meow was commissioned for David Bowie’s Highline Festival by Bowie and director John Cameron Mitchell. Her piece An Audience with Meow Meow premiered at Berkeley Rep with direction by Emma Rice and was recreated for Boston Arts Emerson, directed by Leigh Silverman and designed by Andrea Lauer, choreographed by Sonya Tayeh, MD Lance Horne. Meow has appeared at Joe’s Pub NYC, in the Bard College Spiegeltent Summer series and has performed in concert with Alan Cumming at The Met Museum, and in Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music series. Meow Meow performed in the PIAF! Centenary Celebration Concert at Town Hall with the American Pops Orchestra. Meow Meow has guested with the La Clique, Club Swizzle, and La Soiree companies globally including premiering their seasons at Sydney Opera House, London’s Roundhouse, and in New York City.

Meow’s recent work Apocalypse Meow: Crisis is Born was originally commissioned and presented by Southbank Centre London, followed by a sell-out season at the Wanamaker Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, London. It was then re-imagined for a season at Malthouse Theatre Melbourne directed by Michael Kantor, and later presented as “ A Very Meow Meow Holiday Show” at the Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2019.
Meow Meow has performed as guest artist with iconic orchestra Pink Martini at the Berlin Philharmonie, Royal Albert Hall, Opera Garnier Monte Carlo, the Hollywood Bowl, and across the concert stages of Europe, Canada, and the United States. Their album Hotel Amour: Meow Meow & Thomas M. Lauderdale includes duets with Rufus Wainwright, Barry Humphries, the Von Trapps, and the late Michel Legrand. It was released in 2019 and named one of The Times’ top 100 albums of the year.