Cabaret – Studio 54, New York

Michelle Williams and Alan Cumming in Cabaret at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54, New York. Picture: Joan Marcus

Cabaret continues at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54, New York, in an open-ended run.

The Kit Kat Club has never been more repellent and yet more enticing. The Kit Kat Girls have never been more sullen and yet more watchable. And the Master of Ceremonies has never been more brazen and yet more entertaining. Yes, Cabaret – its denizens more desperate and more enthralling – has returned to Broadway in a new mounting of the Sam Mendes-directed revival that first arrived in 1998 and stayed around for approximately 2,400 performances, closing up shop in 2004. (And as I’m sure you know, the New York production was inspired by the revival Mendes directed some years earlier for the Donmar Warehouse in London.)

As before, Mendes is abetted by Rob Marshall as co-director and choreographer, and the incomparable Alan Cumming is again serving as the leering, threatening Emcee. But like a classic painting that‘s been masterfully restored for an unveiling in some spiffy gallery, this masterpiece seems newly born, its outlines made even sharper, and its perspective deepened. And with the focus even more tightened on place and era, it’s like hearing the brilliant score by its composer, John Kander, and its lyricist, the late Fred Ebb, for the first time. As each number ends, you want to hear it again. And the unwinding of Joe Masteroff’s taut book is totally arresting.

The performers gathered together this time to people Cabaret’s particular world, Berlin 1929-30, are totally at one with the milieu.

Michelle Williams, the three-time Oscar-nominated movie star, makes a smashing Broadway debut as Sally Bowles, the English cabaret singer of limited talent and unlimited sexual proclivity. Vulnerability trembles through her body, threatening to shatter at any moment her self-proclaimed veneer of being “mysterious and fascinating”. Yet, she attacks her musical numbers – including ‘Don’t Tell Mama’ and ‘Mein Herr’ – with verve and the galvanising assurance of someone who has to perform. It’s a tricky exercise: enacting a song-and-dance gal not terribly gifted and yet immeasurably worth watching. Williams carries it off to perfection. And she transforms her climactic rendering of the title song into a harrowing wail for self-annihilation through frivolity.

And like Williams, the others in the cast – even when they’re entertaining the hell out of us – never let us forget they’re dancing on the edge of a cliff, with the onset of Nazism and chaos churning below. As Clifford Bradshaw, the American novelist wannabe who comes to Berlin looking for something to write about, Bill Heck mixes a Yankee sturdiness with roiling uncertainty about his own sexuality. His romantic liaison with Sally smartly reflects the unsettling instability of the society around them.

Caught up even more in the political maelstrom are Cliff’s landlady Fraulein Schneider and her Jewish suitor Herr Schultz. They are exquisitely played by Linda Emond and Danny Burstein. Their singing about the treasured gift of a pineapple becomes an ecstatic amorous rhapsody, and their aborted love affair has never been more heartbreaking.

Adding to the picture of incipient evil that still has human dimensions are Aaron Krohn as a man of shady dealings and fascist leanings who becomes Bradshaw’s first Berlin friend, and Gayle Rankin as a whore who looks to Nazism for a new way of life. Then, there are the Kit Kat Club chorus girls and musicians; they are people you don’t want to mess with and yet you can’t take your eyes off them. Marshall’s choreography and Michael Gibson’s orchestrations snap to a brutal urgency, that catches up the performers.

Of course, overseeing it all is Cumming’s slithery, intimidating Emcee, even while he wows us with his welcoming number, cavorts with “two ladies” or an ape girlfriend and emerges in drag from a kick line. And he, too, with all of his gritty, malevolent persona, his incessant crotch-clutching and butt-grabbing, is yet another soul resolutely, almost insanely trying to ward off doom in this ever-darker, all-consuming cabaret, whose true locale is revealed in the shattering final tableau.

Ron Cohen

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