I have a friend who’s really into musical theatre, and we enjoy each other’s company and comparing notes, so it’s got me happily out of the house a few times over the last couple of years. At its best, it’s hard to imagine anything better. I publish this bad review precisely because I’m not a professional reviewer, and not even ChatGPT will mistake anything I have to say for reportage. So here’s an account of the least accomplished professional show I’ve seen in recent memory. The reason I feel so strongly may be because I know this musical quite well and, at its best, it’s very good indeed. I might be underwhelmed by any show for a hundred petty reasons: what turns this into something like anger are two feelings. First, that I have just witnessed a masterpiece desecrated. Second, that a play that treats prejudice with such care has been allowed to become riddled with it.
As a show, Cabaret has no heroes: just very recognisable, flawed people drifting towards disaster. Having three dimensions to your characters, against a backdrop of the most dismal events of the 20th Century, makes storytelling hard. Cabaret compromises by flattening its male and female leads, Emcee and Sally. But it’s very powerful theatre. As calamity overtakes them, the cast remains relatable, a bit complicit, and very doomed.
Emcee and Sally are cabaret performers, so they carry both the show-within-a-show and the story outside it. Neither character is written fully formed: their inner thoughts are concealed on purpose, so the cast and director must work to elicit their humanity. The former’s loves — an eternal one for the theatre and (dare we suppose) a transitory one for the second principal male, Cliff — drive the plot. Meanwhile, the Emcee haunts the boundary between the cabaret and the outside world. In a musical that blends a breakneck treatment of the very worst of humanity with a piece of entertainment, the Emcee keeps the audience wrongfooted, so we can never be certain where the theatre ends. The ordinary lives of the cast unfold, with deliberate artifice, on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub.
To place the stage in the round, as this production does, is actually brilliant. If you’re going all-in on this show’s blurring of history and artifice, life and showbusiness, tearing down the proscenium and building a low apron is a clever thing to do. To have cut a hydraulic lift into the middle of it, though, feels like an intrusive and anachronistic gimmick, removing the audience once more. It is as though the director felt that the play needs a wisecracking animatronic puppet. The whole point of bringing a stage into the auditorium is to place the audience in its wings.
The incompleteness of the leading characters, against the wholeness of the supporting ones, creates problems. How do you reconcile the charisma and chaotic energy that the Emcee needs with his lack of inner life? The audience will do some of that work, but you cannot sell them an empty shell. Some kind of trajectory needs to be plotted for the Emcee so he is affected by the encroaching horror. It’s a matter for the production how a congenial host, warmly and glibly welcoming us in the opening number, comes to deliver his broken goodbye. He might turn cold and cruel as he embraces the Nazis, or flee in terror having tried to accommodate a regime that would destroy him (hinted by Joel Grey in Fosse’s rather mercurial film interpretation, who leaves the audience stranded). He might also be brought to life as the rest are: as a small, ordinary man, unravelled by his attempt to reconcile the old and new Berlins, winding his own curtain down when he runs out of things to say.
I have seen him given life in all three directions: with a monstrous physicality; with an arch and pervy truculence; or as a little man who utterly slips through his own fingers. In the end, though, one needs to find a way. A clown is a human being under make-up.
Alas, he is not cast well. If only that were the biggest problem.
The opening scenes establish a seedy but somewhat sophisticated Weimar-era nightclub, with the emphasis on fantasy: the telephones on every table let the cast and audience within the play talk to one another. That, of course, is a plot point, but it also signals a certain style of eroticism that Sally is made for. Her style of seduction is to leave much unseen, unsaid, and unknowable. The play is steeped in this liminality: the phones on the tables foreshadow the slow revelation of sexual proclivities; the show’s full of double-entendres; the suggestions imparted by bodies and props are part of bringing the script to life. These all heighten a sense that you can feel something for these people, but never know them. A clever bit of business during The Pineapple Song then wonderfully subverts that conceit. Unfortunately, while we are occasionally rewarded with glimpses of nuance, the Kit Kat Klub performers are abandoned to the lowest plane. Its chorus fills the stage like drunken students who learned about sex from comic books: writhing bodies, a haphazard wardrobe of diaphanous knitwear, all mouths agape and dangling tongues. If my idea of a good time involved grinding articles of underwear together, I would have passed my evening in front of the tumble dryer.
Act 1 Scene 1 conspicuously includes a man in the female chorus: there’s no erotic liminality there. The cast member, tall, broad and muscular, towers over their counterparts. We’re compelled, as the audience, to consider this singular-they. So let’s: it’s the early 1930s, anything goes, and nightclub customers are a broad-tasted lot. (Two Ladies, a jovial song about a ménage à trois, is often staged featuring a man in drag. To suggest that the Emcee has a real off-stage lasciviousness might make him seem less sympathetic. Many directors prefer to keep that powder dry.) Symmetry could be restored by including a feminine performer in the male chorus: it would make this an unremarkable trick of staging. Gender-play would help to indicate why the club cannot survive. ‘Roles are just roles. Fancy what you fancy, dress as you want to dress, and believe what you need to believe’ would be a fitting ethos for a nightclub in Weimar Berlin. But nope: this is womanface casting. Emcee must open the show by selling us an injustice. The cast is one woman short and he’s up there, master of hokum, styling it out. ‘Our deception is beautiful. Even our prejudice is beautiful.’
Sally, played by Eva Noblezada, was magnificent. Poor direction ruined her big number, Cabaret. Here, we see Sally at her ebb. The director hits us over the head with it, having her slurring her lines, careening across the stage as though loaded with anaesthetic. To stop at calling this interpretation ‘plain wrong’ would undersell an act of vandalism. If Sally has a core, it is that she has no core: her life on- and off-stage is pure performance. In this production at least, she never comes close to cracking, so this is the first time we see Sally’s mask slipping, only to reveal more persona.
When times are terrible, her instinct is to abandon her friends and retreat to the theatre. In the midst of this, the song’s innuendo is no longer about sex but self-destruction, played for laughs that never come. The score already implies dislocation through the surprising placement of its key change, and the merest glimmer of make-up applied too hastily or a stolen glance off-stage would have been sufficient to communicate the encroachment of her outer world. Otherwise, she must be composed to be believable.
This review reads like a catalogue of things that the director either misunderstands or destroys on purpose, and it is, but we’ve not even crested the foothills. Let’s turn our attention to the word ‘Jewish’ or ‘Jew’. It’s used sparingly in the book, and it devastates whenever it’s dropped. It’s the sour counterpart to the sweet little German melody that becomes the Nazis’ signature tune. This one word rends the happiness of Schneider and Schultz; it unmasks the ugliness of the principal Nazi when he is at his most relatable; it reveals his allies; it defines the instant when the Emcee sells himself out. There are a hundred ways to deliver the word. It can be whispered, thrown away, sneered, or played straight but with a loaded pause afterwards. It can be dragged out as though the listener is very stupid, and needs to understand that it is the beginning, middle, and end of a one-word argument. And so on.
The most sinister use of the word is given to the Emcee, as a punchline to the song If You Could See Her, about which Joel Grey writes better than I can. The most powerful versions of this number tend to be in student productions, and with good reason. The gorilla costume needs to look a bit low-rent, the dance routine slightly wooden, and the ensemble not quite on top of its tempo changes. It should leave an impression that the Emcee has breezed through an old wardrobe and knocked something together, putting it on after a couple of rehearsals. Unfortunately, in this production, the gorilla suit is lavish, the performer inside inhabits it far too well, and the music and choreography have more polish than they should. The Emcee seems to have been singing it all his life. But finally, he finds a way to rob the killer line of its sting. If we were the Emcee, how should we deliver it? With the zeal of a fresh convert? Between clenched teeth with the hint of a shudder? As a carnival barker, heading straight for the basest emotions of his clientele? Any of these. Just don’t waste it.
In fact, every instance of ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ within the play is ruined by an accelerated, jump-scare shout, so it’s both isolated from its place in the text and hard to discern as a word. This treatment is so universal that is seems as though the actors can hardly bear to taste it in their mouths. This failure to engage is a cold shower of shame. It is notable that the generation on stage tonight, in the main, is the first not to know anybody who was an adult in the 1930s, let alone a Holocaust survivor. Furthermore, Jewish people are less than half of one percent of the UK’s population today, and are seldom seen outside a dwindling handful of cities. We must forgive people for working against a certain ignorance and, given the Internet, antipathy towards Jewish people. But you really don’t need to be Jewish to know how alien Jews must sometimes appear to others, or indeed how disembodying it is to be Jewish and watching a production like tonight’s. To simulate Kristallnacht, as this show does, by having a clown stamp on a balloon while a loudspeaker augments the pop, must either be done incredibly well or seem like a travesty. If my description makes it seem bathetic, it’s because it was.
As Nazism triumphs, the club’s stage crowds with clones of David Bowie in his Thin White Duke era: all blond wigs, dark suits, and fashion-model swagger. The implication is that the colour and magic of the cabaret is drained under an unstoppable tide of khaki and brown. Fosse, at this point, used eyeline, costume, music, and cinematography to make his cabaret misfire in a dozen clever ways. But the Nazis in this show have their own clue about stagecraft, and how to steal a show. What is supposedly intended as anti-theatre, as they gather on stage and stand there in silence, is instead a masterclass in the power of stillness and unity. No mechanical gimmicks or flapping knickers required. Their audition at the Kit Kat Klub knocks the stockings off its incumbents, and one is tempted to let them keep the job. Adolf’s acolytes could hardly have more contempt for culture than the bunch we’d already endured.
Cabaret is supposed to leave you frightened: there are a hundred ways a malign regime can seduce you with order and melody, or else get its boots and teeth into you. As a work, it pushes the lesson that apathy and desperation will always serve the ends of evil. At the risk of taking liberties, this excuses my outrage: I left the theatre with a heart and head full of defiance, rather than empty and bored. But I hope that this is the only time I’ll ever file out of a show about that place and time that accounts for the Nazis so well, and their victims so abjectly.
Leave a Reply