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Meow Meow
Pop
The next Meow Meow concert is scheduled for Saturday, October 4, 2025 at Belvoir St Theatre in Surry Hills, Australia. See all 55 upcoming concerts
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![Watch I Lost Myself (I'm Hungry... and that ain't right) [feat. Pink Martini] music video by Meow Meow](/mkimage/image/thumb/Video113/v4/6b/12/4c/6b124c65-d3d3-c14c-9a7f-27a47e2e563c/194491231323_1_1.jpg/575x575mv.webp "Watch I Lost Myself (I'm Hungry... and that ain't right) [feat. Pink Martini] music video by Meow Meow")
About Meow Meow
Hometown
Australia
Genre
Pop
Updating theater and music traditions ranging from Shakespeare to Weimar-era cabaret for the 21st century, Meow Meow is a multifaceted, award-winning singer and actress on the stage and screen and in the recording studio. She's just as comfortable crowd-surfing through her audience or singing a song by Radiohead as she is continuing the legacies of Édith Piaf and Bertolt Brecht. Thanks to her wide-ranging repertoire, Meow Meow's productions and albums make the most of cabaret's unique blend of tragedy and comedy. On 2008's Vamp, she celebrated dark femininity with a set of original songs penned by her and composer Iain Grandage. Later, she transformed Hans Christian Andersen's fables into poignant stage works: 2012's The Little Match Girl (which was captured on record as Songs from a Little Match Girl) featured songs by Laurie Anderson and Cole Porter, while 2016's The Little Mermaid (and its 2017 soundtrack, Mermaid) incorporated the work of Regina Spektor and Amanda Palmer into Meow's version of the classic tale. Despite the sheer amount of productions she undertakes, she often works with a core group of collaborators; Barry Humphries, Jherek Bischoff, and Pink Martini's Thomas Lauderdale (with whom she worked on 2019's Hotel Amour) are among those helping Meow Meow reimagine what vocal music can be while honoring its enduring emotional power.
Born Melissa Madden-Gray in Canberra and raised in Melbourne, Meow Meow was a soloist with the Young Dancers Theatre in Victoria for six years. She earned a Bachelor of Laws/Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Fine Arts and German from the University of Melbourne, graduated from the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts, and studied theater in Berlin. She began working in Australian film and television in the late '90s, appearing in the TV series Murder Call in 1998 and the sketch comedy show Big Bite during its 2003-2004 season. Her feature films included 2000's Risk and 2003's The Honourable Wally Norman.
During this time, Madden-Gray developed her Meow Meow persona, combining contemporary opera, multimedia performance, and cabaret with a focus on French chanson and the Weimar repertoire. In 2004, she and composer Lance Horne earned a New York Franklin Furnace Performance Art award for Meow Meow and Monsieur Oui, their musical portrait of an aging diva. That year, she began one of her most enduring creative partnerships with Pink Martini's Thomas Lauderdale, who was hired to be her accompanist at a Portland, Oregon festival. In 2007, Meow Meow took her collaboration with Lauderdale into the studio with Here Kitty Kitty … The Lost Sessions, which spanned original songs written by the duo and composer Carl Halvorson as well as traditional cabaret songs written by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler. Also in 2007, she was commissioned by John Cameron Mitchell to perform at the David Bowie-curated High Line Festival. Meow Meow's 2008 projects included Vamp, a celebration of the femme fatale that was produced by Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre and the Sydney Opera House. The show's soundtrack, which featured Iain Grandage and the Wild Dog Orchestra, also arrived that year.
Meow Meow began the 2010s by winning the 2010 Edinburgh International Festival Fringe Prize for her performance at the arts festival. After befriending Amanda Palmer there, Meow subsequently toured with the Dresden Dolls and made a cameo on Palmer's album Theatre Is Evil. That year, she also appeared on the Australian TV comedy Lowdown. In 2011, she premiered her show Meow Meow in Concert at London's Apollo Theatre, and created the role of "the Maitresse" in a London stage adaptation of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. In addition, she appeared in a Greenwich, Connecticut production of Le Bel Indifférent, a one-woman show originally written in 1940 for Édith Piaf. She also reunited with Horne for his 2011 album First Things Last and a cabaret interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen's fable The Little Match Girl. Comprising songs by Laurie Anderson, Cole Porter, and the Magnetic Fields' Stephen Merritt as well as originals by Meow Meow and Grandage, The Little Match Girl earned Meow Meow a 2012 Helpmann Award for Best Cabaret Performer. The show's London production was also televised, and its cast recording, Songs from a Little Match Girl, arrived that year.
Over the next few years, Meow Meow's projects included an appearance on Pink Martini's 2013 album Get Happy; a spoken-word piece about Dutch painter Piet Mondrian at Los Angeles' Disney Hall; and An Audience with Meow Meow, a production that debuted at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in September 2014. The following year, she returned to Australia to appear in His Master's Choice, a production commissioned by Barry Humphries -- better known as his alter ego, Dame Edna -- for the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. She also appeared the Australian TV miniseries The Divorce. In 2016, her cabaret version of Andersen's classic tale The Little Mermaid premiered at the Sydney Festival; its soundtrack, Mermaid, came out the following year.
In 2017, Meow Meow worked with Jherek Bischoff and August von Trapp on Souvenir, a production celebrating the history of the Theatre Royal, Australia's oldest continually working theater. Her 2018 projects included a turn as Titania in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe Theatre and Weimar Cabaret, a celebration of the culture and music of pre-Hitler Germany curated by Humphries. Meow Meow then reunited with Lauderdale and other members of Pink Martini for Hotel Amour, on which she sang in four languages and performed alongside Rufus Wainwright and the von Trapps. Released by Pink Martini's label Heinz Records in March 2019, the album reached number seven on Billboard's Jazz Albums chart. Meow Meow rounded out the year by appearing in Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats, in which she played Griddlebone. ~ Heather Phares
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