Picture: The Other Richard
Cabaret was reviewed at New Wimbledon Theatre, London, then tours until 25 April 2020.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
The Kander and Ebb masterpiece Cabaret, set in the anything-goes, promiscuous last days of the Weimar Republic just as Hitler was starting to change Germany and the world, is a musical I can never get enough of and even though I know the harrowing ending off by heart, it never ceases to send an icy chill down the spine.
When director Rufus Norris got his hands on it in 2006 at the Lyric and again at the Savoy six years later, he made Act II even darker and the brutal climax almost unbearably grim.
Those in the Wimbledon audience who knew only the softer (but still potent) 1972 multi-award-winning movie will have had quite a shock and the long, stunned silence that preceded the much deserved standing ovation told quite a story. They must even have wondered whether Cabaret the musical and Cabaret the movie were related.
The tender, late-life but doomed romance between Fraulein Schneider, the ancient owner of a Berlin boarding house, and the old Jewish grocer Schultz who wooed her so charmingly was ditched for the film and a new major character, a bisexual baron called Max, introduced.
So the beautiful numbers ‘What Now?’, ‘It Couldn’t Please Me More’ (also known as ‘The Pineapple Song’) and ‘What Would You Do?’ which are so perfectly conveyed by Anita Harris and James Paterson in this latest Norris revival, sadly never made it on to celluloid.
That wasn’t the half of it. Sally Bowles, originally a head-in-the-sand Hooray Henrietta of modest talent from the Home Counties who performed at 1930s Berlin’s seedy KitKatKlub, became the ditsy American torch singer whom Liza Minnelli vamped up for an Oscar.
And Cliff Bradshaw, the sexually ambiguous would-be novelist from Oklahoma who had writers’ block, never seemed to get even the first page written on his old Remington and had to rely on shady business trips to Paris to pay the rent, became posh but naive Englishman Brian Roberts.
Apart from Minnelli, the most memorable moment in the film was the blond Hitler Youth singing ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ in a voice that had yet to break. If only he had known what ‘tomorrow’ was going to bring…
It is tellingly sung by the Emcee in an inspired performance by John Partridge in this touring revival of Cabaret – Wimbledon was the fourth of 13 ports of call before it finishes at the end of April – and the good folk of Manchester, Leeds, Canterbury, Sheffield, Cardiff, Stoke, Inverness, Liverpool and Milton Keynes are in for a treat.
Apart from Brian Dennen in the original 1968 West End production, I’ve seen all the Emcees, a part which ambitious actors would run barefoot over broken glass to play, and none, not even Oscar winner Joel Grey or Alan Cumming, with rouged nipples and suggestively-placed suspenders in Sam Mendes’ Donmar debut, Julian Clary and Will Young, has done it better than Partridge.
Underrated probably because he is most associated with his five-year stint as gay hunk Christian Clarke in EastEnders, he has plenty of West End musicals cred. He is simply magnificent, funny but always with a sinister undercurrent, sly, wheedling, always in touch with the audience, and his ‘Two Ladies’ routine under a giant sheet, helped by Sara Morley as the raven-haired Helga and Catherine Saunders as Fritzie, is just one of many high spots.
Most of the applause was for him. My guest said she never wanted Act I to end and even resented the interval as it interrupted her rapt enjoyment. Act II is not so much fun because Adolf and his boys rear their ugly heads, beating up anybody who tries to oppose them, interceding in the Schneider marriage plans because her intended is Jewish and generally making life hell for any non-followers.
Anita Harris is a revelation as I mistakenly thought of her mainly as a 60s recording and TV star who appeared in a couple of Carry On films. She has done musicals, Cats and Annie, and is loved for her pantomime work. Nearer 80 than 70, she has still very much got it.
Kara Lily Hayworth as Sally will perhaps be a new name to those who didn’t catch her in Cilla The Musical or the revival of Lionel Bart’s Maggie May on the London Fringe. She has a pure voice and her soulful, ever hopeful ‘Maybe This Time’ is quite wonderful.
Charles Hagerty reprises the American Bradshaw who heads back to the States without the pregnant Sally before the sh*t fully hits the fan, Nick Tizzard is a menacing Ernst Ludwig and Basienka Blake has a strong stage presence as Fraulein Kost.
Choreography by Javier De Frutos is outstanding, Katrina Lindsay’s inventive set faultless and musical director Phil Cornwell and his seven cohorts have a whale of a time with some of the greatest show tunes ever written.
Come to the cabaret, old chum? I certainly did and it was bliss.
Jeremy Chapman
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