Meow Meow was languorously grooming herself after a performance with the Melbourne Symphony when she answered a recent phone call from The Chronicle.

“Pulling off sequins and glitter and false eyelashes, darling,” she practically purred.

Back home in Australia, the post-postmodern New York diva, songwriter and Pink Martini muse was still buzzing from her show “The 20s, and all that dissonance,” a typically erudite and over-the-top three-hour Meow Meow production exploring Europe’s cultural unraveling after the bloodletting of World War I.

The music might be a century old, but in evoking the era of Dada and Kurt Schwitters, Weimar Germany, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, she said she was struck by “how similar the situation is today.”

“我唱很多音乐,couldn’t be more relevant, as Brecht and Weill and (Hanns) Eisler were really tackling politics and gender,” she said, “and all these issues that have not gone away.”

Meow Meow, also known as Melissa Madden Gray, plans to cover some of the same ground when she returns to the Bay Area on Sunday, Oct. 30, to kick off Bay Area Cabaret’s 2022-23 season at the Fairmont Hotel’s storied Venetian Room.

The concert series also includes award-winning vocalist Carole J. Bufford’s hit show “Vintage Pop!” (Nov. 20); Catherine Russell’s new show “Send For Me” (Feb. 26); Julie Benko, the emerging star who’s gracefully navigated the roiling backstage drama around the hit Broadway revival of “Funny Girl,” who is expected to make her Bay Area debut with Jason Yeager performing “Hand in Hand” (April 16); and finally “A Pizzarelli Family Reunion” (May 14), featuring the return of guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli with Jessica Molaskey.

While Meow Meow is making her Venetian Room debut, she is hardly a stranger to Bay Area audiences. She followed a five-week 2014 run at Berkeley Rep with her San Francisco Symphony debut in 2015, co-curating a cabaret-inspired show with conductor Edwin Outwater for the company’s SoundBox series.

But booking her to open the Bay Area Cabaret season is an interesting move for a series that focuses on Broadway stars, mainstream jazz vocalists and American Songbook aficionados.

Rather than deconstructing the conventions of cabaret, Meow Meow gleefully toys with them before leaving them shredded like a catnip-infused chew toy. Known for recruiting unwitting audience members as stage accessories, she has crafted a persona cut from similarly fabulous cloth as her friendTaylor Mac. But for Marilyn Levinson, Bay Area Cabaret founder and executive producer, it’s Meow Meow’s ability to inhabit historically fraught material that makes her the ideal woman for the moment. In the years before the advent of COVID-19, she toured widely with her prescient show “Apocalypse Meow: Crisis Is Born.”

“She’s who I wanted for opening night,” Levinson said. “Like it or not, a lot of what’s happening now is in response to the pandemic. She challenges you to come experience this and be changed.

“And she’s agreed there’s no crowd surfing in this performance.”

The pandemic’s long shadow definitely touches the Bay Area Cabaret series. In April 2020, COVID-19 took Pizzarelli’s father, legendary seven-string jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli (followed one week later by his mother, Ruth Pizzarelli). Benko and Yeager had just fallen in love when they started sheltering in place together, and their show draws on the music that helped get them through, including songs byAnaïs Mitchell, Nina Simone and Janis Joplin.

Meow Meow was in the midst of a collaboration with German dance company Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal when she came down with an early case of COVID. In Western Australia for a Perth International Arts Festival performance with Pink Martini’s Jim Lauderdale and Rufus Wainwright at the time, she ended up quarantined in one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns. A bout of long COVID took her out of action for almost 18 months, she said, but is “really grateful for having my brain back.”

Not surprisingly, she loves the symphony-backed shows on big stages, but she’s at her most freewheeling in venues like the Venetian Room, accompanied by pianist Lance Hall.

“I do love the flexibility of the cabaret form,” she said. “This isn’t a show with a dramatic through line. What I love is you’re telling stories within each song, a whole world of passion and pain.

“I can’t choose material that doesn’t feel epic in some way,” she added. “I love French ’60s music, and I’ve written a lot with Jim Lauderdale from Pink Martini, but right now it’s interesting to look at the resonances from pieces from the 1920s and ’30s. It’s scary that they’re so on the money.”

Bay Area Cabaret presents Meow Meow:7:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct 30. The Venetian Room, Fairmont Hotel, 950 Mason St., S.F. $90.www.bayareacabaret.org