Theatre in Review: Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club (August Wilson Theatre)

	Eddie Redmayne and company. Photo: Marc Brenner

When did Cabaret become so effortful? It's a recent development for a nearly sixty-year-old musical that has been remarkably supple in terms of bending with the times. A ground-breaking, norm-rattling work in 1966, it was brilliantly adapted to film by Bob Fosse; many of screenwriter Jay Presson Allen's inventions were incorporated into Sam Mendes' revival, seen on Broadway in 1998 -- 2004 and 2014 -- 2015. Mendes' staging upped the ante in many ways, revamping Joe Masteroff's book and turning the entire theatre into the Kit Kat Club, the rattletrap Berlin dive where misfits and miscreants shelter from the growing Nazi storm. Indeed, Cabaret has joined that select club of musicals, such as Show Boat and Candide, which are newly revised and/or rethought each time.

But in Rebecca Frecknall's staging, which doubles down on the immersive concept, its leering invitation to sin has become a mechanical bump and grind and its thrills have lost much of their tinselly, tacky allure. A show that frankly traffics in the grotesque, which, in its original production, featured a tilted mirror that implicated the audience in the characters' race to oblivion, has been converted into a big, boozy night out for fun-seeking patrons. Frecknall's main innovation is a lengthy "prologue" -- really, an extended drinks party -- staged in the theatre's lobby areas, featuring themed cocktails and cooch dancers swaying their hips to a klezmer-style band. It's a crowded, tedious sixty minutes, an unnecessary add-on to a production that has inexplicably ballooned to a three-hour running time.

Once the show gets underway, many of its problems can be traced back to its two stars. (I'd call them miscast except they are so clearly giving their director exactly what she requested.) Eddie Redmayne's Emcee, dressed like a club kid at Limelight circa 1985 (complete with opera gloves and party hat) is weird in all the wrong ways, moving jerkily -- like a marionette pulled about by a bored child - and delivering breathy vocals compromised by terrible diction. (This is true of no one else onstage.) It's a major loss: The Emcee -- Cabaret's most original invention -- is our Virgil in this underworld, a practiced seducer who pulls us in and, while we're having fun, savagely pulls the rug out from underneath us. Redmayne exerts himself mightily while remaining oddly disengaged. Possessed of a sweet, choir-boy voice in his upper register, he is ill at ease with his character's livelier, more vaudevillian turns; most crucially, he can't manage the transition from the audience's wicked confidant to its betrayer.

The role of Sally Bowles, the good-time girl with a gold-plated heart, has always been tricky. Some complained that Jill Haworth (the 1966 Sally) lacked a certain spark; others insisted that Liza Minnelli (in the film) was too electrifying to be convincing as a no-talent canary. Natasha Richardson, in the 1998 revival, best threaded the needle, delivering a character of limited skill but undeniable charm, living by her wits and utterly convinced that tomorrow will bring something better -- stardom, a wealthy lover, or at least a smashing party to attend. At the Wilson, Gayle Rankin enters dressed like Baby Snooks, delivering "Don't Tell Mama" with barking, snarling aggression, curdling the sly humor of Fred Ebb's lyrics. (Never mind what it does to John Kander's kicky melody.) She's an excessively studied eccentric, offering bizarre line readings suggestive of a borderline personality. When allowed a quiet, thoughtful moment, she can be incisive, and she achieves a real poignancy in the later scenes. But she also renders the title tune as a conniption fit, shaking convulsively and delivering the words in a howl of rage. Performed straightforwardly, the number is inherently dramatic; there's no need to make a spectacle of herself.

Rankin has little chemistry with Ato Blankson-Wood, lost in all the hubbub as Cliff, the semi-innocent American novelist drawn into Sally's orbit. It's not the actor's fault: Masteroff's book converts the narrator of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories (the show's source material) into a stolid, conventional musical theatre leading man. Somewhere along the way, he lost his only ballad, "Why Should I Wake Up," leaving him with little to say for himself. Beginning with the film, he was made bisexual, a source of dramatic tension when both he and Sally were entangled with their German patron. (The character, here known as Ernst, who charms the unwitting Cliff into a Nazi smuggling scheme, is capably played by Henry Gottfried.) But that triangle has long gone by the boards: In this version, Cliff's sexuality is little more than a distracting detail that has little bearing on his doomed attempt at domesticating Sally.

The touching subplot, about a pair of aging lovers separated by Nazi-spawned Jew-hatred, exists in another universe altogether thanks to a pair of superb pros. Steven Skybell brings tremendous dignity and pathos to Herr Schultz, a Semitic grocer who foolishly believes that the fascist threat will quickly blow over. Bebe Neuwirth, raising a fist in fury against a cruel fate she will ultimately accommodate, is nothing less than monumental, stopping the show with the lacerating "What Would You Do?" Interestingly, the production's two oldest performers also generate the show's most authentic erotic spark. At the end of "Pineapple," in which Schultz gifts his lady love with an exotic fruit, the way he slips it into a brown paper bag (accompanied by a meaningful look) is sexier than any of the thrusting pelvises and self-fingerings in the Kit Kat Club numbers.

Indeed, whenever this Cabaret isn't trying so strenuously to display its vulgar bona fides, it has its moments. Julia Cheng's staging of the first-act finale, in which Herr Schultz and Fräulein Schneider's engagement party is broken up by the fascist anthem "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," is chillingly effective, as is the sinister final tableau, with the cast assembled on the stage's turntable, seemingly rolling toward disaster. (The vandalizing of Herr Schultz's store is stunningly suggested with a jolting sound cue and hail of paper on the stage.) But the opening number, "Wilkommen," has become an epic-length parade of unfunny staging bits; "Two Ladies," a salute to the ménage à trois, descends into a chaotically staged orgy; and "If You Could See Her," featuring the Emcee frolicking with a gorilla, lacks the initial tenderness that makes its ugly conclusion ("She wouldn't look Jewish at all") such a punch in the gut.

To create the immersive Kit Kat Club environment, the scenic and theatre designer Tom Scutt has reworked the August Wilson auditorium into an in-the-round space with a tiny circular stage, a strategy that works surprisingly well. (He also plausibly converts the rest of the theatre into the den of iniquity needed for the pre-show event.) His costumes, however, are often dauntingly ugly; one wonders why Sally keeps wandering in from the cold in little more than her tattered lingerie; yes, Germany is collapsing, but she owns a dress, doesn't she? (Sam Cox's wig and hair designs lean toward Louise Brooks-style bobs and Guy Common's makeup is heavy on rouge and eyeliner -- and the women are overdone, too.) Isabella Byrd supplies some of her very best lighting here, creating muscular arrangements of white beams that enhance the theatricality of each scene. If he can't do much with Redmayne's vocals, the rest of Tom Lidster's sound design is clear and natural.

It may well be that, thanks to so many long-running revivals and a film that never goes out of circulation, Cabaret is simply overexposed. But a musical that means to lure us in with its seedy, seamy glamor before revealing the death's head at its center is compromised by direction that spells out the subtext and telegraphs the show's outcome early and often: If Rebecca Frecknall were a comic, she'd give you the punch line first.--David Barbour