Meow Meow’s The Red Shoes
His Majesty’s Theatre
Friday, February 27 2026
Acclaimed international chanteuse Meow Meow brought her cabaret-infused interpretation of The Red Shoes to Perth Festival this season. Frenetic, passionate, and so sharply intelligent it could easily have drawn blood, this was both a deconstruction of and meta-commentary on the original Hans Christian Andersen fairytale, as well as a deep contemplation of the arts and their place within our all too messy modern moment.
The audience entered His Majesty’s Theatre to a staticky radio that played show tunes and big band themes from approximately a century ago, with half the stage awash with the detritus of the current day, easily an entire street’s worth of council verge collection. Tonight’s band—Mark Jones, Dan Witton, and Jethro Woodward—came to the fore, dusty and careworn, twirling three upright pianos between them as if marching batons before literally dragging Meow out into the spotlight.
Meow, inert on the ground, seemingly unconscious or exhausted, needed multiple prods and a microphone shoved in her face to begin the performance. Voice pitch-perfect from the off, Meow railed against the world, slowly winding her energy levels up like clockwork and asking what the point of any art was in 2026, under these conditions.
“Why must there be an opening number?” Meow implored as she tore into the conventions of musical theatre, before her voice glitched across to playback, akin to Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive, reverting to live performance after a moment. Despite the tired cynicism clearly on display, Meow also embodied an aching loss for an era when theatre meant something, which, according to her, did not include much, if any, of the twenty-first century.
One red boot fell from the sky. The true story of the evening began, and Meow took note of the large pile of rubbish stage right—a dramaturg had once told her it was the physical representation of the mind, but that couldn’t be true as she pulled Amazon packages from various nooks. Perhaps it was the end of an unspecified empire instead, or the wreckage of broken dreams.
Suddenly, from a fridge, an embryo of an idea arrived in the form of tenor Kenan Breen, singing Paul Anka whilst seemingly costumed as Gollum. Meow quickly moved to throttle this errant thought back in the literal box and went back to retelling Andersen’s original rendition of the story. Distracted again, this time with the failure of communism, Meow channelled The Young Ones mixed with Monty Python, beginning a hilariously absurdist 152-verse salute to the discredited ideology.
After further thought, Meow decided to let Breen out of the fridge to see where this blunt metaphor for a creative vision would go. For the first few minutes, Breen simply flopped around on the stage, like a fish out of water—Meow’s commentary on this was that the best content for our current era seemed to be misery porn, so lean into it.
Courtesy of one of the Amazon boxes, Breen’s transformation into a faun began—cue a whip-smart throwaway line about Vaslav Nijinsky and Dionysus. Meow herself took on the persona of a burlesque showgirl, adding yet another layer to the performance as she and Breen now narrated the piece, seemingly from a smoke-filled Brooklyn dive bar.
After the quickest foray into French New Wave meeting Eurovision, Breen evolved into their final form for the night: Hans Christian Andersen himself. This allowed Meow to begin a discussion with the author on what the heck he was on about in the original tale. Less an interview, more an interrogation, which quickly took on all the hallmarks of a panic attack as Meow furiously worked herself into an existential crisis. Breen cut through all this with a pair of absolutely powerhouse songs, completely in Danish.
For the first time all night, the focus was no longer on Meow; the audience was silent in astonishment before vigorous applause broke out. Meow regained her composure, and the former interrogation became more of a two-way conversation as the duo warily circled each other on stage, speaking both of love and loss, greed and nihilism.
The performance sped up again as Meow was seduced by avarice, by capitalism, by an almost visible lust—the ability to have as many red shoes as she wanted in the current economy still left her empty and unfulfilled, sobbing as she crawled across the floor.
The faun returned, comforted and loved her, and perhaps, just perhaps, that would be enough.
A spectacular piece of theatre, The Red Shoes as Meow Meow imagined it, was as much about 2026 as 1845, late-stage capitalism as much as any children’s morality tale. Fantastic songs, music, and staging were reinforced by a script deftly on the edge between comedy and tragedy, yet also so dense with theatre lore it likely needed a three-hour DVD commentary.
Anna Pavlova had once inhabited the same spaces in this very theatre, and at times tonight it appeared that the cast communed with the ghosts of their theatrical forebears almost more than the living audience. A thorough and rigorous investigation as to why art is important, especially in oppressive times—this was everything the theatre experience could and should be.