You’ll want to catch this purr-formance!
A new mews-ical about two sisters training their cat for a spot in the illustrious Moscow Cat Circus will pounce into Williamsburg next week. The creator of “Vera & Valya & The Magical One Cat Circus,” opening at Standard ToyKraft on Nov. 3, says the show has enough plot twists and extra elements that it may leave the audience cat-atonic.
“It’s really delightful. It’s got a little bit of everything, music, dancing, good jokes, bad jokes, really bizarre irony, and full on slapstick tumbling,” said Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, who wrote, directs, and acts in the show. “And in the middle of all this are these two very strange, lovable Russian women doing stand up comedy in the middle of a folk tale.”
The play centers on Vera and Valya, two cat-training sisters in rural Russia who audition their kitty Skazka — who looks like a normal human man — for the Moscow cat circus. But the circus director is a detective is disguise, who accuses the sisters of kidnapping a young boy and raising him to im-fur-sonate a feline.
The sisters strive to keep their unusual family together with a series of shenanigans, even as the real ringleader of the cat circus appears at their door. The bizarre string of events has its roots in Russian fairy tales, said Leonhard-Hooper.
“The Russian fairy tales inspired the show because the inconceivable happens all the time,” said Leonhard-Hooper. “There’s no sense of what someone ultimately is. A character could transform into different animals, or die and get pieced back into something else. There’s just a sense that people aren’t so worried about what people are in these fairy tales, and to me, there’s something really lovely in that.”
Leonhard-Hooper strove to mirror the wild story telling conventions of those tales while crafting her whimsical story.
“They are these really fantastic journeys that keep growing to the point where you forget what story you’re in,” she said. “It’s like you’re watching someone riding a horse through four different stories and you’re barely hanging on and keeping up. So like the Russian fairy tales, our production is a weird mash-up.”
The show features a live accordion player, who riffs on folk tunes and folk-pop mash-ups for the musical numbers.
Standard ToyKraft’s third-floor space is a perfect locale for the performance, said Leonhard-Hooper.
“It looks like what I picture the sisters’ insane set-up would be,” said Leonhard-Hooper. “It has beautiful church pews and hanging lanterns. It just feels right for the energy of the show. It’s a good place to soak it all up.”
“Vera & Valya & The Magical One Cat Circus” at Standard ToyKraft [722 Metropolitan Ave. between Manhattan and Graham avenues in Williamsburg, (718) 388–3163, www.stand
