Review: Outstanding Performances Highlight MTSU Theatre's All-Too-Brief Run of Kander and Ebb's Timeless CABARET

If challenged to create a list of my all-time favorite musicals, you may rest assured that the Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret - based upon the play I Am A Camera by John Van Druten, which itself was inspired by Christopher Isherwood's fictionalized memoir about time spent in Weimar-era Germany toward the end of the Jazz Age - would definitely rank near the top. Cabaret possesses everything that I hope to encounter when I witness musical theater: intriguing characters, evocative settings, dynamic tension and songs that I could listen to on a continuous loop for the rest of my life.

In fact, for the past several months, I've listened every day to the cast recording from Rebecca Frecknall's critically lauded and Olivier Award-winning 2021 West End revival that originally starred Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley - whose expressive and devastating performances are captured so perfectly that the digital recording of a live performance at London's Kit Kat Klub can instantly transport me to Berlin during the interwar years, a period fraught with debauchery, intense poverty, libidinous excess and political upheaval.

To be certain, Cabaret (in every iteration I have ever seen), represents the awesome power of live theater to challenge preconceived notions while creating a world audiences can only visit when in the thrall of a talented cast of actors inspired to indulge in fantasy while maintaining an earthbound realism that illuminates the human condition at any possible time in human history.

Perhaps most telling about the impact of Cabaret is the prescient nature of its story that somehow seems relevant and compelling when it is produced, no matter the timing.

Case in point: the all-too-brief run of John Kander and Fred Ebb's brilliant 1966 musical (with book by Joe Masteroff), presented by an eager cast and crew of young and ambitious theater artists in a production by the theater department of Middle Tennessee State University, that concluded its four-performance stand at Tucker Theatre last night. Thoroughly entertaining, MTSU Theatre's Cabaret showed the depth of talent that runs throughout the theater program at the Murfreesboro university and allowed an enthusiastic audience access to one of musical theater's finest works.

With its subsequent revivals since its original Broadway run, Cabaret lends itself to new concepts and fresh reiterations. What was once considered the perfect way to tell the story - hewing to the original staging that featured Joel Grey as the Emcee - to Sam Mendes/Rob Marshall's vision for the 1998 revival (starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson) that actually began with a 1993 production at Donmar Warehouse, or the 2014 reimagined production of that particular staging, Cabaret can be depicted in so many new and inventive ways indicative of its split personality, theatrically speaking. Instead of a frivolous diversion of showbiz exploits of the 1920s, it can be presented more seriously as a portrait of a society in rapid decline.

MTSU Theatre's Cabaret, directed by Danielle Roos and choreographed by Piper Whitmore, with the superior musical direction of Angela Tipps (whose onstage orchestra performs the score with professionalism and artistic flair), appears somewhat unfocused and uncertain of its aims and falls somewhere midway between frivolous and tragic, bereft of details that would more accurately set its depiction in a particular time and place in 20th Century history.

With a gorgeous set designed by Rick Duessen that captured perfectly the seedy environs of the Kit Kat Klub in 1929 - beautifully, evocatively and stunningly lighted by Darren Levin's superb design - the production's physical trappings helped usher the audience back to Weimar Germany in its waning days, as the Nazi peril became more apparent to threaten the country's truncated experiment with democracy, which already was hobbled by the events of the Great Depression that began two years earlier amid the aftermath of the Great War which left the nation's people literally and figuratively starving to death.

MTSU's Cabaret features committed performances by its large cast, led by Christian Newton as the Emcee, Mary-Beth Mangrum as the questionably talented chanteuse Sally Bowles and Bo Bryan as American writer Clifford Bradshaw, whose arrival in Berlin on New Year's Eve sets into motion the events that give the show its dramatic arc which is set to the sublime music of Kander and Ebb's unforgettable score.

Newton particularly shines in the show's quintessential opening number - "Wilkommen" - making the most of his first appearance in the spotlight (and bathed in the golden glow of Levin's footlights), serving as the audience's guide throughout the scandalous, somewhat seamy, affairs of Berlin nightlife during the last gasp of individualism and artistic pursuit, however depraved it might have been.

Mangrum is lovely and well-cast as the Kit Kat Klub's headlining performer, "the toast of Mayfair, Miss Sally Bowles" and acquits herself admirably with a performance that mixes her palpable stage presence with Sally's trademark hits. "Don't Tell Mama," "Mein Herr" and "Cabaret" land with some certainty in her interpretation, but "Maybe This Time" seems to lack context (is it part of Sally's Kit Kat Klub act or part of her "real" life - is it fish or fowl?).

Bryan's performance is noteworthy for a role that oftentimes seems an afterthought in some productions: His Clifford Bradshaw is engaged in everything that happens around him and he confidently inserts himself into the onstage theatrics/offstage intrigue that captures the encroaching sense of dread that permeates the atmosphere. Bryan's speaking voice is mature and powerful - he certainly sounds like a leading man.

Among the large cast of supporting players, Vanessa Jarman as boarding house owner Fraulein Schneider and Garret Hall as her Jewish suitor (and fruit stand merchant) Herr Schultz, are impressive as they play characters many years their senior, effectively sounding and acting much older than they are in their real lives. However, Whitmore's choreography of "Married," abruptly destroys the illusion created by the pair's reasoned portrayals by having them dancing a pseudo-balletic pas de deux that defies their character's maturity, Jarman's impressive split notwithstanding.

Jarman's plaintive "What Would You Do" late in Act Two is particularly and effectively emotional in light of the coming political storm that could have destroyed the world had it been allowed to continue unabated, and Newton's heartbreaking "I Don't Care Much" underscores all those fears, heightened by his sincere approach to the material.

Max Fleischhacker is fine as the somewhat duplicitous Ernst Ludwig, who smuggles funds from Paris to Berlin to fund the Nazi Party's nascent organizing efforts, while taking English lessons from Cliff and longing for a physical relationship with him. Reghan Hall's Fraulein Kost, the prostitute who plies her trade within the walls of Fraulein Schneider's hostel, is particularly impressive with her Act One finale performance of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" which brings the first stanza to a near-cataclysmic, ultimately chilling conclusion that leaves the audience uncertain of whether to applaud or to burst into tears of what history history foretells us is coming to the world.

Stokeley Ellison, Moira Cagle, Sarah Oppmann, Emma Bastin, RJ Joffs and Bryleigh Anders are cast as the Kit Kat Girls, with Logan Purcell, Travis Ray, Jackson Roy and Cameron Anteski as the Kit Kat Boys, and Lyndarious Arrington and Audrey Perkins completing the ensemble. Oppmann and Purcell are terrific in their trio with Newton - "Two Ladies" - that is ribald, raunchy and somehow chaste and rather sweet all at the same time.

Cabaret. Music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Book by Joe Masteroff. Directed by Danielle Roos. Musical direction by Angela Tipps. Choreographed by Piper Whitmore. Stage managed by Lauren Thomas, Catalina Rice and Eddie Schauwecker. Presented by MTSU Theater and Dance, at the Tucker Theatre on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro. April 6-8. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes (with one 15-minute intermission).

PHOTOS BY John Underwood

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