Opening March 2026 at The Misplaced Property’s West London house, Chat Noir! is the newest creation from The Misplaced Property, the corporate behind The Nice Christmas Feast and 58th Avenue; celebrated for remodeling reside efficiency into totally realised worlds.
Right here, audiences shall be transported to bohemian Montmartre of the Eighteen Nineties, contained in the legendary Le Chat Noir – the unique Parisian cabaret membership that launched a cultural revolution and gave beginning to the fashionable nightlife we nonetheless chase immediately.
It begins, as all good nights in Paris do, with a secret door.
Step by it and end up within the coronary heart of Montmartre in 1896 – a world of smoke, music and riot. The clink of glasses, the scent of absinthe, the heartbeat of music rising by the evening.
Welcome to Chat Noir!, the place The Misplaced Property invitations audiences to journey again to the birthplace of cabaret for a night of artwork, absinthe and anarchy.
On the centre of the story stands Rodolphe Salis – the real-life proprietor of Le Chat Noir and architect of its most infamous cabarets – as he prepares his remaining, and most bold, creation: a feverish celebration of affection and insanity. Performed by the ‘Dandy King of Cabaret’, Joe Morrose, Salis is a person aflame with concepts, careering between anarchy and artwork, chasing one final second of transcendence earlier than the curtain falls.
Tonight he has summoned the best artists of his age — the magician Buatier De Kolta (carried out by acclaimed magician Neil Kelso), dancer Cléo de Mérode, mime Paul LeGrand (carried out by the virtuosic Pi the Mime), and chanteuse Yvette Guilbert — to create one remaining, audacious revue, an evening of affection, insanity, and French artwork from throughout the ages. Collectively they conjure a spread present of reckless brilliance, accompanied by the membership’s home band, Les Enfants Vagabondes.
A wild troupe of bohemian musicians, led by the younger Erik Satie, take their place on the coronary heart of Chat Noir!. One of the crucial eccentric and influential figures of the Parisian avant-garde, audiences be part of Satie on the peak of his profession because the real-life resident pianist of the unique Le Chat Noir – a composer whose music would go on to outline a technology of French modernism. Referred to as Les Enfants Vagabondes, the ensemble carry out new preparations of French late-Romantic masterpieces by The Misplaced Property’s composer-in-residence, Steffan Rees. Their ragtag quintet – piano, violin, cello, accordion and percussion – reimagines Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Bizet’s Carmen, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre for an evening that blurs the road between magnificence and delirium.
Because the night unfolds, their performances spill from stage to flooring, musicians roaming between tables whereas a spellbinding sequence of shadow puppetry transforms gentle and smoke into dwelling artwork. It’s a world the place sound, motion and phantasm entwine, and the place cabaret first sparked into a worldwide phenomenon.
As evening falls, friends slip right into a world of after-dark delights. Inside, they turn out to be a part of the story as they be part of the writers, illustrators, poets and musicians who made Montmartre hum – the artists, revolutionaries and mad romantics who lived by evening and dined between poems, work and half-finished manifestos. The expertise evokes the key suppers of Paris’s wayward aristocrats, the place indulgence is an artwork type and pleasure a quiet riot.
Visitors dine as they did – not with aristocratic formality however with urge for food and abandon. The tables are laden with the basic haute delicacies dishes that gave beginning to trendy gastronomy: Coq au Vin, Crème Brûlée, champagne, absinthe, Parisian cocktails and an intensive old-world wine checklist. The Misplaced Property Government Chef Ashley Clarke and Head of Drinks Ilya Demenkov have created a feast of butter, brilliance and bohemia, served beneath flickering lamplight.
That is time journey by velvet and smoke – a dwelling, respiratory story the place music, theatre, design and hospitality turn out to be a single murals. This extraordinary immersive world is created by The Misplaced Property’s Head of Design Thomas Kirk Shannon, lighting designer Mike Gunning (Alice’s Adventures Underground, Drowned Man, Grace Jones) and couture by Susan Kulkarni (Secret Cinema, Come Alive!). The Misplaced Property are quick turning into the leaders in immersive reside arts experiences, crafting worlds that blur the strains between stage and actuality and supply Londoners one thing uncommon: an evening that feels prefer it might change historical past – an evening out, a century within the making.
The world of Chat Noir! is designed for give up. Visitors costume in Classic Parisian model – silks, velvets, waistcoats and smoky eyes – and cross a threshold the place telephones are forbidden and time loses its grip. Someplace between dinner and dream, the town outdoors disappears and the cabaret begins.
Talking in regards to the expertise, William Kunhardt, co-founder of The Misplaced Property, stated: “Each expertise by The Misplaced Property begins the identical method – an obsession with a second in time when artwork, hospitality, and visionary folks collided to create an inflection level in tradition.
“Chat Noir! is the expression of our newest obsession: the bohemian subculture of Eighteen Nineties Paris, the dawning of French Haute Delicacies, and amidst it all of the impresario Rodolphe Salis along with his masterpiece, Le Chat Noir. It was the world’s first cabaret – a night-club the place nice French artists gathered to share and experiment, the place each layer of Parisian society got here to be entertained, provoked, and liberated. Eating, consuming, and inventive freedom grew to become one. A motion was born that will change international tradition without end. What a second to deliver again to life – to provide folks the prospect to journey again in time and step inside this extraordinary nocturnal world, indulge completely and reside out some of the explosive, daring and hedonistic moments in European cultural historical past.”
Chat Noir! opens in West Kensington, London on March 24, 2026. Tickets can be found right here.
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