BWW Reviews: Playhouse on Park's CABARET is Delicious, Dark and 'Deja Vu'

Cabaret
Book by Joe Masteroff
Music by John Kander
Lyrics by Fred Ebb
Directed by Sean Harris
at Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, CT through July 21
http://www.playhouseonpark.org

Cabaret is, in my estimation, as close to a perfect musical as one can get. The characters are vivid; the story masterfully transitions from playful to poignant to devastating. The lyrics by Fred Ebb and music by John Kander at times comment on the situation and at other times advance the plot.

Cabaret nabbed the 1967 Tony for Best Musical and the 1973 Oscar for Best Film. The performances by Joel Grey (who won a Tony and an Oscar as the Emcee) and Liza Minnelli (the Oscar for her career-making turn as Sally Bowles) seemed both iconic and indelible.

The 1998 revival came roaring onto Broadway and exploded our conception of Cabaret. Gone was Grey's tuxedoed Emcee with the bee-sting lips, replaced by Alan Cummings' track-marked junkie hedonist. Minnelli's spit-curled American kewpie was substituted with Natasha Richardson's British libertine. The production was spare, sexed up and reveled in the gaudy, boozy, druggy final days of the Weimar Republic.

In other words, a benchmark stage musical became a benchmark film and, once again, became a benchmark stage musical. This happened not once, but twice for Kander and Ebb. Their smash, similarly brilliant show Chicago was shockingly reconceived for its revival and film. It goes to show that with a visionary look at a well-known musical, everything old cannot only become new again, it can become almost wholly original.

This is the blessing and the curse of The Playhouse on Park production of Cabaret. Instead of putting their own artistic stamp on the piece, they have taken us back to the 1998 revival (with a few small nips from the 1973 film). Like the company's recent production of Chicago, Playhouse on Park borrows liberally from its predecessors and fails to make us see the piece in a new light. But, if you are going to copy, copy from the best and in that regard Director Sean Harris and Choreographer Darlene Zoller have succeeded. This edition does not rethink the play in any significant manner, but it does serve to remind us of how deliciously dark, demented and devilish Cabaret can be.

Brendan Norton's Emcee is almost a note-for-note rip of Alan Cummings' seminal performance. Norton snarls, seethes and leers at the audience, acting as both Master of Ceremonies in the club and a mockingbird in the boarding house. Where he departs from Cummings is that the interpretation loses some of the giddy joy and sly wit. If that seems like an unfair comparison, the production and the performance invite it. Norton is clearly working hard, but it almost always shows, a fact that betrays the free-wheeling, hedonistic pleasures to be found in the cabaret.

Conversely, Erin Lindsey Krom's Sally Bowles does not mimic Minnelli or Richardson, leaving her to chart her own gamine path. She does not possess Minnelli's voice and is certainly a better singer than Richardson, but she proves that she can handle the material and dances beautifully. Her devastating turn on the title song shows how insidious the demise of the Weimar Era has become with Sally's rage running counter to the seemingly chipper lyrics.

The finest performance in the piece, and I am not sure any critic has ever written this before, belongs to the man playing Cliff Bradshaw. An American novelist visiting Berlin, he sits in the stead of the original author, Christopher Isherwood. Acting as a camera silently recording the action surrounding him, Cliff could seem flat against such colorful cabaret denizens as Sally and the Emcee. In Jake Loewenthal's hands, he is incredibly empathetic and shaded.

Similarly, the secondary roles of Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz (all but absent from the film version) are beautifully fleshed out and realized by Kathleen Huber and Damian Buzzerio. It is a delight to have their four songs (all cut from the film or reduced to background music) restored and interpreted with sensitivity. The stage version has two other songs cut from the film: the Emcee's elegiac "I Don't Care Much" and Sally's cute "Don't Tell Mama." Super-sizing this stage version are the songs that were inserted into the film: "Maybe this Time," "Money, Money" and "Mein Herr." This accounts for the show's near-three hour running length.

Because of the strength of the quartet of Krom, Loewenthal, Huber and Buzzerio, the scenes and songs set in Schneider's boarding house take on greater charm and poignancy. It is in these moments Harris shows his strength as a director and Cabaret's power as a play.

The scenes within the cabaret itself are mainly relegated to song and dance numbers choreographed by Darlene Zoller (with bits pirated from both the 1998 revival and the 1973 film, particular the Fosse chair dance from "Mein Herr"). The ensemble, in tattered nylons, suspenders and bruises, execute the dance sequences with vigor, but again seem a bit joyless. To be sure the rise of Nazism and the death of the Weimar Republic are nothing to celebrate, but Cabaret is a party at the end of the world and any production will always be "wilkommen."

Photo of Brendan Norton and the Kit Kat Club Girls by Richard Wagner.

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