Robert Tanitch reviews The Black Cat Cabaret at London Wonderground, South Bank Centre
The Black Cat Cabaret takes it inspiration from Le Chat Noir, the first modern cabaret club, founded by Louis Salis in Montmartre in 1881, and legendary for its satire and anti-Establishment songs and its clientele of adventurers and courtesans.
It was a place where poets, writers, musicians and singers could perform spontaneously and be paid with free beer and absinthe by Salis. A popular rendezvous until his death in 1897, its patrons included such luminaries as Jane Avril, Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, Yvette Guilbert, Aristide Bruant, Paul Verlaine and Emil Zola.
Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s iconic chat noir poster, created in 1896, remains one of the most popular prints of the Art Nouveau era.
The present Black Cat Cabaret, lyrical and louche, founded in 2013, is largely circus-driven. Impresario and director Dusty Limits sings and comperes with innuendo in the Julian Clary manner.
Vicky Butterfly, dancing and waving her ostrich feathers and illuminated Isis Wings, recalls Loie Fuller, the embodiment of the Art Deco movement. Jess Love, very blasé, keeps six hula hoops spinning round her body. She also appears in the nude.
Miss Macabre eats fire and breathes fire. The Cabaret Rouge (five chorus girls) reminds you that that the sweet ballerinas Edward Degas painted were almost certainly prostitutes.
Jo Moss, within a Cyr wheel, does a dazzling acrobatic act based on Leonardo DA Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Aerial artists Katharine & Hugo do sexy and dangerous acrobatic things within a cage hung above the stage and at a phenomenal, spinning speed.
The funniest act is by David Armand, who illustrates and interprets entirely in mime the lyrics of Queen’s Don’t Touch Me Now. He is as manic as Lee Evans and hilarious.
The award-winning Black Cat Cabaret is performing in a wooden circus tent right next to Hungerford Bridge and the Golden Jubilee Bridges, seconds away from the London Eye, on selective Friday nights at 9.30 until 26 September.
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