Cabaret at the Lido2, Paris until 3 February 2023.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
42nd Street at the Theatre du Chatelet, Paris until 15 January 2023
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Treat yourself to a 10-star festive break, better still give someone you love a divinely decadent Christmas present, and get over to Paris for the first classic Broadway musicals double-header to thrill the French capital at the same time – in English.
They might (just) be able to beat us at football but British-based casts sure as hell get their own back with Kander and Ebb’s stupendous Cabaret at the sparkling new Lido2 on the Champs-Elysees and a long-delayed revival of tap-tap-tap triumphant 42nd Street at the regal Theatre du Chatelet down by the Seine.
One Englishman who did score from the spot (sorry, Harry) was ace director Stephen Mear who helmed the huge team connected with 42nd Street so magnificently while the man of the match, judging from the Cabaret clapometer, had to be Sam Buttery, wearing a sequinned black dress, presumably in homage to Liza Minnelli, and making the most of his juiciest role yet as the grotesque Emcee.
His whitened face is the one staring at you from the hoardings and posters around the city and the Metro announcing the launch of an enterprise that will be sweet music to the ears of musical theatre lovers. After 75 years the lavish floorshows which earned the old Lido fame all over the world, a Paris landmark where stars from Piaf to Dietrich, Chevalier and Coward, even Elton John, performed in its heyday, are gone. So farewell to the fabulous feathers of cabarets past and willkommen, bienvenue, welcome to Lido2Paris, its official title from now on.
Buttery isn’t the only newish name shining brightly in this great city. At the Chatelet an elfin bundle of energy called Emily Langham is getting everybody’s feet tapping as Peggy Sawyer, the out-of-town chorus-liner who steps up to plate when the star of the show within a show injures herself.
In a life imitating art scenario 17-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones did the same when plucked out of the chorus for 42nd Street’s West End premiere 38 years ago when the actress playing Peggy and her understudy suddenly became indisposed at the same time.
Zeta-Jones later took on the role full-time and went on to fame, fortune and Oscar glory. Langham is no barely-known teenager – she graduated from ArtsEd back in 2015 and had a big part in the UK tour of White Christmas around this time last year – but 42nd Street is a move up the ladder and I hope we see much more of her.
It’s a great team effort with top-form contributions from Alex Hanson, Rachel Stanley, Jack North, Annette McLaughlin, Cedric Neal and Jess Buckby in an effervescent cast too big to namecheck everybody.
Chatelet regular Gareth Valentine directs the Orchestre de Chatelet who have a ball with Harry Warren’s memorable score (lyrics by Al Rubin) and Peter McKintosh’s colour-coordinated costumes and spectacular sets are simply off the scale. The Chatelet never does anything by halves and with director Mear also in charge of the choreography, it’s an evening of undiluted pleasure.
We revel in such timeless standards as ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’, ‘Lullaby of Broadway’, ‘We’re in the Money’ and, of course, the title song from the between-the-wars days when you could rhyme “naughty” with “forty”.
Mear first directed 42nd Street for the Chatelet six years ago and this is third time lucky for this reprise of a timeless tale of old Broadway when life was even tougher for theatre folk than it is today. Two previous attempts were thwarted by the pandemic. In 2016 it received only four stars from this reviewer for whom a little tap goes a long way. He used to find it limited and repetitious and this musical is one non-stop orgy of tap. I must have revised my view since or else this is a superior product. The latter I think. This time it merits the full five, with bells on.
Yet while the unstoppable Langham tap-dances her way into everyone’s heart at the Chatelet and larger-than-life Buttery’s ‘I Don’t Care Much’ (‘So if you kiss me, if we touch, warning’s fair, I don’t care very much’) reduced me to tears, it was a star of the older generation who won my personal Oscar.
Paris double: Sam Buttery (left), Gary Milner and Sally Ann Triplett (right) and Lizzy Connolly (right, above) in Cabaret at Lido2 [Pictures: Julien Benhamou] and the cast of 42nd Street at Theatre du Chatelet (left, above)
As the Berlin boarding-house proprietress wooed by the old Jewish fruiterer Herr Schultz in a relationship doomed to fail as the Nazis make their move in a country still reeling from the repercussions of the First World War, Triplett offers an incredibly moving performance, her rich contralto soaring on a trio of Kander and Ebb’s most glorious compositions, ‘So What?’, ‘It Couldn’t Please Me More’ and ‘Married’.
Gary Milner duets with her blissfully as the pineapple-bringing suitor, the chemistry between the pair simply electric – hardly surprising as they’ve been real-life husband and wife for 23 years!
Such a shame this secondary love story and those superb songs were completely exorcised from Bob Fosse’s eight-Oscar-winning 1972 film. Maybe if he’d left them in, it would have won a ninth, the big one too, for Best Picture.
Good though Lizzy Connolly as second-rate chanteuse Sally Bowles and Oliver Dench as would-be American novelist Cliff Bradshaw are in the main narrative (book by Joe Masteroff) – Connolly spot-on as self-obsessed Sally, a gin-swigging Home Counties Hooray Henrietta if ever there was one – it is the scenes involving Schneider and Schultz that director Robert Carsen has worked to perfection.
Carsen is no newcomer to Paris as Jean-Luc Choplin, now artistic director at Lido2, brought the Canadian over when he was doing the same job at the Chatelet back in 2006 and together they put on Candide, later My Fair Lady and Singin’ in the Rain, fulfilling Choplin’s long-held dream of introducing the great Broadway musicals to Paris in their untranslated form but with French surtitles at the side of the stage.
Now they are back in harness with a more traditional Cabaret (making its English-language debut in Paris) than the ground-breaking, award-winning Rebecca Frecknall version at London’s own Kit Kat Club, but still a musical and visual feast.
This extraordinary musical, such a personal favourite that it’s never a hardship to revisit, remains as disturbing as ever with its sweet and sour satirical depiction of violence, anti-Semitism, closeted homosexuality and abortion in between-the-wars Germany.
The Act I finale where blowsy Fraulein Kost (Charlie Martin) reprises the chilling ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, the anthem of the Hitler Youth movement sung earlier by the Paris National Opera’s children’s choir, and the hitherto friendly Herr Ludwig (Ciarán Owens) proudly reveals a Swastika armband and a Nazi salute, leaves the audience so stunned that instead of applause there is almost silence at the interval.
Musical director Bob Broad has half of the Lido2 orchestra to one side of the stage and half on the other while there is clever use of the diamond pit in the centre of the stage bequeathed by the old Lido. This device seamlessly aids scene changes from seedy night club to boarding house to fruit stall in a masterpiece of design.
Choreographer Fabian Aloise had a field day with a 17-strong ensemble – and Buttery dancing with a gorilla! – but shouldn’t they have looked even tattier, like they were when Sam Mendes made his Donmar debut in 1993 with a cast headed by Alan Cumming and Jane Horrocks?
Once this Cabaret’s run finishes in early February, the theatre closes until the end of November for extensive renovations although it looked glitzy enough from my vantage point on a red-velvet-lined chair behind my own table. It’s a tough life but someone has to do it…
Besides, it’s the total experience that counts as much as the show itself… the helpful staff who show you to your table, the perfect acoustics, the unhindered view of the action and generous leg room. Like the Chatelet, the new kid on the block is far from expensive by West End standards. The best seat in both houses for £200 the pair rates a bargain when you look at the prices the Palladium is asking for The Wizard of Oz next summer or how much it is to get an equivalent view at Moulin Rouge. And in midweek you can get a Eurostar return – yes, they are still running – for under £100, just about.
For those on a budget, I took the lift to the fifth tier of the Chatelet (yes, it’s massive) and for €33 (about £29) the view is first class for the money though not advisable if you suffer from vertigo!
If your name is Kane, you might even get a freebie. That name is suddenly very popular in France…
Jeremy Chapman
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