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CABARET
* Book by Joe Masteroff. Music by John Kander. Lyrics by Fred Ebb * Directed by Sam Mendes * Co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall * Starring Natasha Richardson, Alan Cumming, John Benjamin Hickey, Ron Rifkin, and Mary Louise Wilson * Roundabout Theatre at the Kit Kat Club, New York City |
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Whatever fond memories you have of Cabaret -- Liza Liza Liza, divine decadence, darling! -- director Sam Mendes sweeps them away the minute you walk through the door. For this revival (based on a 1993 production at London’s Donmar Warehouse, which Mendes runs), the Roundabout Theatre has taken over the long-empty Henry Miller Theater, ripped out the seating, installed tables, and turned the place into a nightclub. Most amazing of all, he’s turned what you might think is a big splashy Broadway musical into a scrappy little nightclub act of almost overpowering intimacy. Forget Joel Grey in a tux. The MC here is a lanky British androgyne (Alan Cumming) with a pierced eyebrow, glitter-brushed nipples, and armpits furry enough to warrant a special Tony Award. The Kit Kat Club musicians, who all sing and dance, are raunchy, scarred, tattooed, cigar-chomping hairy beasts -- and those are just the girls, who also warrant a new Tony category: Sluttiest Makeup on Broadway. The scenes that make up the book of the show (very, very, very loosely inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories) are treated like vaudeville numbers, sliding on and off like standup comics at a burlesque house. Clifford Bradshaw (John Benjamin Hickey), a timid Middle American fag voyeuristically touring the continent collecting material for a novel, rents a room in the rundown Berlin boarding-house of Fraulein Schneider (Mary Louise Wilson),. Before he can say boo, he’s sharing quarters with a pushy English showgirl named Sally Bowles (Natasha Richardson). Mendes’ staging is a non-stop thrill ride, as impressive for its ensemble acting as for its stripped-down theatricality. When Sally tells Cliff she’s pregnant and he urges her to keep the baby, the MC drags a standup mike onstage for her to sing “Maybe This Time.” When she has second thoughts about giving up showbiz, it’s the MC who sings “I Don’t Care Much” as if he’s inside her mind, while she sits and smokes. For most of the show, Richardson plays Sally as such a sentimental plain-jane that you get antsy for some glamor. But by the time she trembles through the anthemic title song looking like she’s hemorrhaging from an abortion, you realize that the director has gone another way with his interpretation. In his 1974 memoir Contradictions, director Hal Prince confessed that the original Cabaret was compromised by the decision to make Cliff and Sally a heterosexual romance because Broadway in 1966 couldn’t handle a gay leading character. The current production struggles awkwardly to freshen up the dated book: one minute Cliff is kissing rentboys and the next he wants to drag Sally back to join the Harrisburg PTA. Further indulging this desire to dress up a period story in today’s political consciousness, Mendes ends the show with the MC in prison uniform wearing both a yellow star and a pink triangle. At the curtain call the cast looks stricken, as if we’re supposed to treat them like survivors of Auschwitz. It’s a distasteful display of bogus social comment. Hal Prince had to be convinced not to close his production with footage of race riots in Little Rock, but at least that was an idea linking German bigotry to the homegrown variety. Instead of proposing pertinent parallels between now and then, this Cabaret’s retroactive Holocaust references smack of smug we-know-better superiority. To paraphrase Bette Midler, it’s a pits ending to a really terrific show. --end-- In his 1974 memoir Contradictions, director Hal Prince confessed that the original Cabaret was compromised by the decision to make Cliff and Sally a heterosexual romance because Broadway in 1966 couldn’t handle a gay leading character. The current production struggles awkwardly to freshen up the dated book: one minute Cliff is kissing rentboys and the next he wants to drag Sally back to join the Harrisburg PTA. Further indulging this desire to dress up a period story in today’s political consciousness, Mendes ends the show with the MC in prison uniform wearing both a yellow star and a pink triangle, while the rest of the cast hovers behind him in what looks like a gas chamber. Oh please. We all know what hapened to the Weimar Republic. Part of what makes Cabaret so pungent is that its partygoers carry on heedless that the end is near. To hit the audience over the head with that point seems gratuitous and, well, tacky. To paraphrase Bette Midler, it’s a pits ending to a really terrific show. The Advocate, April 28, 1998 |
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