Meow Meow turns The Hub into her glittery, shimmery palace in this rowdy cabaret version of The Little Mermaid, where the classic tale becomes the pretext for an exercise in deconstructing the pipe dreams of love.
Meow Meow arrives on stage blubbering, “This is a show about happiness”. She then goes on to lecture us about the impossibility of finding love in a world in crisis, prancing around the stage in diving flippers. In between impressive vocal performances, such as a cover of Regina Spektor’s appropriately aqueous “Après moi le déluge (After me comes the flood)”, supported by The Siren Effect Orchestra, she takes apart her own fantasies of true love – literally pulling her former suitors’ best parts (an arm, a foot…) from a trapdoor on stage.
Whether she goes crowd surfind, or flying above the audience in a fishing net, she unabashedly catches all the light with true diva quality, crafting a show that seems perpetually fascinated with its own shiny surface but playfully escapes the pitfall of superficiality.
Hans Christian Andersen’s original tale is pared down to its two central figures: a young mermaid who exchanges her voice for human legs, and a prince. The well-known story becomes a vehicle for the artist’s dizzying soul-searching and questions about her own performance, the flow of which is frequently interrupted by the comings and goings of a technician (Chris Ryan) who has come to do a health and safety check on the show. The Little Mermaid makes for a bittersweet and fun-filled evening.