Will Young in the touring production of Cabaret at the New WImbledon Theatre. Picture: Roy Tan
Cabaret was reviewed at the New Wimbledon Theatre, London before continuing on tour.
Never mind what those ‘Best Musicals of All Time’ polls say, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s hilarious, poignant and, yes, frankly shocking interpretation of Christopher Isherwood’s autobigraphical novel is one of the greatest ever written, some would say THE greatest, and now audiences around the country will have the chance to enjoy what many saw in the West End last autumn.
A 13-centre tour of this decadent tale of Weimar Berlin in the early 1930s kicked off in Wimbledon to a full standing ovation – and deservedly so.
Will Young has come a long way since looking totally out of place in Mrs Henderson Presents and The Vortex, and in the uber-camp Emcee role that the actor/singer was surely born to play, he is simply stupendous.
Anyone who says that the original Emcee Joel Grey set the bar so high that nobody could follow must think again: Gray was wonderful, Young is wonderful, better perhaps at the funny bits – the romp in a bed with various members of both sexes is terrific – and it is good to see him carrying on and carrying the show, from West End to Wolverhampton, where the tour winds up at the end of November.
Unlike the eight-time Oscar-winning movie in which a blond young vision of Germany’s Hitler Youth movement sings the scary ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, the job of bringing Act I to a menacing end is left to Young in director Rufus Norris’ version and it is most effective.
Although we see a whole huddle of naked bodies in the mind-boggling climax to the production, the current Cabaret is toned down a tad from Norris’ 2006 version in which that fine actress Anna Maxwell Martin played Sally Bowles. Martin was just right because she played the role as an average singer, which is what Isherwood intended, working for buttons in a seedy Berlin nightclub.
Hollywood tossed all that aside in encouraging Liza Minnelli to give a top-of-the-range vocal performance, which of course won her an Oscar, but the film wasn’t what Kander and Ebb had in mind. For a start, in the movie there was no Herr Schultz (Linal Haft, perfectly both Jewish and German, even improving on his West End performance), nor the poignant love affair between his lovestruck old shopkeeper and the wistful landlady Fraulein Schneider which is the key second element to the relationship between bisexual Clifford Bradshaw (Matt Rawle still in the part, still excellent) and the OTT Sally.
Here Siobhan Dillon, a finalist in the BBC talent search How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria? back in 2006, takes over from Michelle Ryan and is a distinct improvement on the former EastEnders actress. Not that Ryan was bad, but Dillon is more animated and outrageous. She can certainly sing up a storm, as she demonstrated in Grease, Legally Blonde and Ghost the Musical, but she cleverly manages to give the impression of a girl not good enough to go further than she has done, certainly not to cabaret stardom.
Valerie Cutko as Fraulein Kost, the sailors’ go-to lady-of-the-night when their ship comes in, almost steals the show. She acts it brilliantly and sings well. The programme says she has played the part in the West End, but this was the first time I had seen her taking it on, and she is a revelation.
Nicholas Tizzard solidly reprises the role of Ernst Ludwig, the Nazi sympathiser who wheedles his way into Bradshaw’s life and, when crossed, has him beaten up, but former New Seekers star Lyn Paul is a disappointing Fraulein Schneider, with an undercooked German accent and needing to up her game, which she hopefully can do as the run rolls on.
Paul makes nothing of ‘So What?’, that painfully moving song of longing and regret, and is as yet a fair way behind recent Schneiders in Sheila Hancock and Sian Phillips.
I loved this Cabaret under Javier De Frutos’ inspired choreography when I saw it in London last year and, if anything, I like it even more now. Like West Side Story, it is a timeless and relevant reminder of the racial hatred which starts wars whether they be gangland battles in Manhattan or global conflicts like the Second World War.
Jeremy Chapman
The tour of Cabaret continues:
September: Liverpool Empire (2–7), Manchester Opera House (9–14), Bristol Hippodrome (17–21), Bradford Alhambra (23–28)
October: Congress Theatre, Eastbourne (1–5), Blackpool Winter Gardens (15–19), King’s Theatre, Edinburgh (21–26), Gaiety Theatre, Dublin (29–Nov 2)
November: New Theatre, Oxford (5–9), Tunbridge Wells Assembly Hall (12–16), New Theatre, Hull (18–23), Wolverhampton Grand (26–30)
Comments are closed.