BWW Reviews: Too Little Life in Matthew Wild's CABARET at the Fugard, Old Chum

The Fugard Theatre's production of CABARET begins with a perfectly realised moment of theatre. As the sound of a typewriter clicks away, the audience is transported to Berlin in 1929 as the words that Cliff Bradshaw will ultimately speak at the show's end appear on a scrim as the character himself lights up like a ghost behind it. Before long, the magic of that moment wears off, and this production of the classic John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff musical begins to flounder in Matthew Wild's directionless staging of the piece. The failure of this production to come together is a double blow, not only because it is an anti-climactic follow up to the Fugard's incredibly successful production of THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW, but also because of the kind of musical that CABARET is, one that pulsates with relevance and which still has the power to unsettle audiences around the world.

Almost 50 years after its Broadway premiere in 1966, there is no doubt that CABARET is a one of the great musicals in the canon. First appearing in a legendary staging by Harold Prince, CABARET has been reinvented time and time again, most notably in Bob Fosse's 1972 film and in a 1993 staging by Sam Mendes for the Donmar Warehouse that Mendes refined in collaboration with Rob Marshall for a Broadway production in 1998. That latter production seems to feature the song stack most preferred by contemporary productions of the piece and includes the songs added for the film - "Mein Herr", "Maybe This Time" and "Money" - as well as the restored number "I Don't Care Much", while cutting "The Telephone Song", "Meeskite" and the two songs written as solos for Cliff, "Why Should I Wake Up?" and "Don't Go".

So it is with this CABARET, which otherwise tells the familiar story of a man caught up in the decadent nightlife of Berlin as Germany negotiates its treacherous shift towards putting the Nazis in power. Cliff Bradshaw arrives in Berlin, befriending the rather shady Ernst Ludwig, who directs him to rooms rented out by the pragmatic Fräulein Schneider. On his first night in town, as the Germans bid farewell to the 1920s, he visits the Kit Kat Klub. The club is home to a bevy of licentious performers who are introduced to the audience by its charismatic Emcee. Cliff meets second-rate singer Sally Bowles, who moves in with him after she is fired. As the year moves on, Cliff and Sally find themselves in the thick of things as the National Socialist movement begins to catch fire. A Jewish fruiterer, Herr Schulz, romances Fräulein Schneider; Sally falls pregnant; and Cliff begins to smuggle items into Berlin for Ernst to earn money to care for his child. But when Cliff begins to see through the Nazi Party's intentions as it gains more and more influence, he realises that it is time face up to what is going on around him.

There is a great deal to CABARET, a musical that deals with its milieu and themes in an incredibly subtle manner. While it does so against the backdrop of what will become the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust, the show remains powerful because it compels us to ask ourselves to what extent we choose to remain blind to what is going on around us, whether this might be in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Cambodia, Sudan or in our own backyard. The idea that CABARET makes us ask big questions like that is completely absent in Wild's staging. Perhaps he lacks faith in the genre or in the piece itself.

As a case in point, one need only look at the potent final scene of the first act, which Wild undermines by having the cast throw orange peels around the stage as they sing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me". The intention behind the action is clear - on a basic level, the characters are destroying the livelihood, the property and the dignity of the Jewish host whose party they are attending; it is a microcosm of the Holocaust itself - but what might have been a useful rehearsal room improvisation plays out absurdly onstage. And when this staging fails as a mise en scène that illuminates the plot of CABARET and its themes, one of Hitler's speeches is rolled out to do the job that should have been done by the scene.

This production of CABARET is full of similar apparently clever ideas, all contrived to place the focus on the staging rather than the show itself. Almost every inch of humour has been wrung from the piece and the depravity of the Kit Kat Klub is so hyped up at the start of the show that the production struggles to find its stride and develop thematically. Louisa Talbot's choreography, which brings many of the club numbers to life, starts off promisingly with a proposal for a movement vocabulary that functions as an aid to storytelling and characterisation. But with Wild's vision at the helm of the production, those intentions unravel before the first number is over, abandoned for a choreographic score characterised by foot stamping and simulated fellatio. What has been mistaken for edgy creativity here ends up being clichéd and witless.

Worst of all is the lack of definition in the relationship between the world of the club and the reality that surrounds it. The Kit Kat Klub and Berlin simply exist side by side as though one were not engineered to comment upon the other, but it is in the exploration of that relationship where everything that makes CABARET work is to be found. When the boundaries between the two worlds come crashing down, as they should when the final montage that pours out of Cliff's mind as he leaves Berlin plays out, the audience should be mesmerised. Instead, Wild leaves us as lost as the actors look, with everyone wandering around a little boy igniting pyrotechnics onstage and some of the characters suddenly appearing in prison clothes from the concentration camps.

The cast of CABARET works hard to tell the story of the piece despite the prodigious odds against them. Charl-Johan Lingenfelder is a striking Emcee and he works hard to hold the show together. His valiant attempts to counter Wild's shapeless direction leave the audience with less of a sense of the shape-shifting conférencier of the Kit Kat Klub than a performer fighting to tell a story left untold in this staging of the show.

Cliff is an even trickier character to find, with most productions - including this one, where the part is serviceably played by Daniel Buys - seeming happy to embrace his role as the "camera" through which the action of CABARET is observed. Relegating him to play the outside observer is the easy way out: the best productions of CABARET are those that remember that Cliff needs to be caught up in something if his dilemma around getting out of Berlin is to mean anything at all. Short-changing Cliff's purpose in the piece is but one of the problems caused by the unwelcome intrusion of "Maybe This Time" when it surfaces midway through the first act, although portraying Cliff's conflict is a difficulty CABARET has faced throughout its history, with neither "Why Should I Wake Up?" nor "Don't Go" quite illuminating the character's role in the drama.

If the Emcee and Cliff prove to be somewhat elusive figures in this production, everything about Claire Taylor's Sally Bowles is devastatingly self-evident. One of the most intriguing characters in the musical theatre canon, one that is flexible enough to support any number of compelling interpretations, is reduced to an angry toddler, petulantly stamping its feet when things do not go its way. Taylor sings the score well enough, but there is a bland uniformity that characterises her performance throughout the show, from her first appearance in "Don't Tell Mama" right through to her delivery "Cabaret" near the show's final curtain. There seems to be little understanding of Sally's character or its function in the play; this is evidenced in Wild having cut Sally from the opening number. A moment to which the audience must return in order to understand why Sally chooses to remain blind to the events that surround her and why her arrangement with Cliff can never work, it is in her introduction that any Sally must establish who she is and her volatile link between the worlds of the Kit Kat Klub and the real-world milieu of CABARET.

Some of the supporting characters are brought to life more successfully, with Michele Maxwell offering a moving reading of Fräulein Scheider despite playing opposite a lacklustre Mike Huff as Herr Schulz. Shannyn Fourie has a difficult time with Fräulein Kost due to Wild's attempt to excise any and all humour from the play, but delivers a beautifully smoky, Marlene Dietrich-styled vocal in "Married". As Ernst, Ludwig Binge offers a typically oily reading of the role. The ensemble bobs from number to number, seemingly unaffected by the decay of the world that surrounds them.

The band, under the sure hand of musical director Kate Borthwick, delivers a fine reading of the score. It is rather a pity that sound designer Mark Malherbe seems content to let the noisy mechanics of the Tina Driedijk's set overwhelm the aural environment of the production.

Driedijk's set is in any case completely wrong for this show in this space. The cumbersome central unit that moves up- and downstage throughout the performance does nothing to contribute to the rhythmic ebb and flow of the piece and fails to facilitate successfully the juxtaposition of the two worlds that exist within the musical. The use of projections in the piece, with video, mapping and animation by Anwar McWhite, is superfluous and the dull scrim upon which much of the projections appear makes for an insipid backdrop to the many scenes that now appear to play "in one", divorced from the action of the play proper. The atmospheric lighting by Kobus Roussow and Benjamin du Plessis copes with well the challenges created by the scenic design and the projections. Penny Simpson's costumes add some visual texture to the piece, although the mostly dull palette feels incompatible with some of the brighter accents in her designs.

Just as the Fugard Theatre's CABARET is about to draw to a close, the production attempts once more to create theatrical magic with its final image. Describing what happens would ruin the surprise, but the effectiveness of the image is dulled because it has already been used three times in the production already without any sense of progression as a developing motif. In the hands of another director, this production - with the same cast, creatives and design team - could have been phenomenal, but Wild simply is not up to the task. With the Fugard Theatre lining up another production of a classic musical for him later this year, Wild may yet redeem himself as a musical theatre director when WEST SIDE STORY opens at the Artscape Opera House in July. For now, his work on CABARET leaves this classic musical with too little life and no sense of why this piece endures almost half a century after its first performances.

CABARET is currently running at the Fugard Theatre, with bookings open through to the end of May on Computicket or via the Fugard Theatre box office on 021 461 4554.

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