Cabaret: Blinding Furnace
Bass Concert Hall,
September 10
Life is a cabaret, old chum. That means life is cocaine, gin, smuggled French perfume, a disused typewriter, and sex. Lots of sex. Gender-bending, gender crisscrossing, bawdy, drippy, hot, anything-goes sex. So much sex that it has become a cottage industry, a life force one dare not acknowledge publicly in decadent, yet oddly naive, Berlin. At the Kit Kat Club, the late-night cabaret trumpets the lewd and the sinewy in irreverent after-hours song and dance. Life, old chum, is pure self-indulgence, with a slight socialist bent. At least, that is the way things begin in this revamped revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s brilliant musical Cabaret, now touring the country in this variation on the current Broadway production. Where the story winds up is what makes this musical such an important piece of theatre.
Life is the cabaret, wherein the story takes shape and whose songs and musical sketches serve to illuminate the (d)evolution of the hedonistic, roaring 1920s into the grotesque and deadly 1930s. When a young American novelist, Clifford Bradshaw, arrives in Berlin and meets Sally Bowles, a sultry English cabaret singer, the flicker of hope for personal fulfillment for the couple is no match for the smoldering heat of the rise of the Nazi movement, a blinding furnace by musical’s end. And for an elderly couple — boardinghouse owner Fräulein Schneider and her Jewish tenant, Herr Schultz — their romance, a late-blooming flower, is slowly crushed like a white rose in a black leather fist. The insidiousness of the Nazis taking control and its effect on the characters is what gives this musical its breathtaking impact, but it owes as much to the audience’s awareness of the impending historical catastrophe as the care the audience develops for the characters as they fumble through their disastrous personal and political choices.
Actress Kate Shindle is a high-spirited, free-loving Sally Bowles. Her acting is good, but her singing is phenomenal. As the Kit Kat Club Emcee, Jon Peterson is lascivious and cute simultaneously; he’s full of surprises, popping up in the middle of cabaret numbers when not introducing them, and acting as a handy extra hand to segue in and out of the exterior scenes. This overt theatricality, and the tawdry, tired flash of the cabaret designs (costumes by William Ivey Long, sets by Robert Brill), move this musical from happy-go-lucky innocence to grim, stark reality. Color and mirth decay to ashen, Expressionist-inspired, nightmarish images.
There are hurdles that this touring production sometimes struggles to overcome. The most problematic: The intimacy in the original production’s environmental design cannot be matched in the hulking, acoustically challenging Bass. But even though it is dwarfed by the hall that houses it, this Cabaret, as conceived by director Sam Mendes and choreographer Rob Marshall, still reaches beyond the stage to grip the audience, ultimately dragging all into the white hot blaze of lost innocence.
This article appears in September 22 • 2000.