Cabaret

Don’t tell momma, but six months after opening in Shaftesbury Avenue, Cabaret has suddenly become dark, daring and dangerous to know. Whether it’s because director Rufus Norris and choreographer Javier de Frutos (who won an Olivier for his work here) have tightened-up their original staging, or because of the sight of fresh and feisty Kim Medcalf as the new Sally Bowles wearing the frilly pants and snorting nose-loads of illegal substances, the show still avoids the familiar Bob Fosse/Liza Minnelli comfort zone and has taken on a new, startling edginess that blows the mind and tugs the heartstrings.

In a production that was always in danger of allowing the overall concept to run away with the familiar Kander and Ebb tunes, ex-EastEnder Medcalf holds the show together, giving unexpected West End vocal clout to her routines at Berlin’s Kit Kat Klub, where Nazis and naked bums make happy bedfellows. Compared to Anna Maxwell Martin, whose Sally was a second-rate floosie with Mayfair pretensions, there’s no question that Medcalf’s slightly rancid goodtime gal really did make her mind up back in Chelsea, that when she goes she’s “going like Elsie”. The flaky relationship with Michael Hayden’s Cliff also becomes more believable, driving “Maybe This Time” into the realms of personal tragedy.

After Sheila Hancock’s star turn as Fraulein Schneider, accent-wise, Honor Blackman sometimes sounds more Berkhamsted posh than Berlin guttural, yet she brings a quiet dignity to the key scenes with Francis Matthews’ Jewish Herr Shultz. In what feels almost like a completely new emphasis, their doomed relationship turns out to be the only example of human dignity on stage. James Dreyfus, from the original cast, now fully inhabits the sleazy skin of the monstrous Emcee, with a direct-to-audience delivery that culminates in the still-shocking final image of naked Holocaust horror. Unlike most musicals, the curtain falls to stunned silence, broken only by the sound of jaws dropping.

NOTE: The following TWO-STAR review dates October 2006 and this production’s original West End opening and cast.

While John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Chicago is one of the great restored modern musicals in its long-running cabaret-style second coming, Cabaret itself, written a few years earlier (1966) and forever memorialised in Bob Fosse’s brilliant, slightly distorting 1972 film starring Liza Minnelli, needs no such rescue job.

Which is why I find Rufus Norris’ heavy-handed, misguidedly cast production at the Lyric so disappointing. We know that Joe Masteroff’s book and the wonderful Kander and Ebb songs present the Kit Kat Klub in Berlin, where Sally Bowles earns her living as a singer, as a seedbed of Nazism, and that the Christopher Isherwood-like hero, the English teacher and writer Clifford Bradshaw, stumbles on a situation running out of control.

Right from the start you know Norris is making things too complicated, as James Dreyfus’ emphatically tawdry Emcee materialises in a vortex-like letter “O” in the spelt out “Wilkommen” of Katrina Lindsay’s design. The letters dissolve into a series of high, angular flats that enunciate “Weimar Republic – it’s a bad place” from the moment the club dancers are seen shimmying around in black lingerie and vapid facial expressions.

Instead of the insinuating dances of the original show (by Ron Field) or the trademark bentwood chairs and bowlers of Fosse’s stunning film arrangements, Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos gives us lots of bottom spanking and unequivocal gyrations. When they get their kit off in the Kit Kat Klub, the chorus become Health and Efficiency stormtroopers, naked in the snow, transmuting into a huddle of concentration camp victims at the end.

This is a neat point, but it's overloading the musical with seriousness. That wonderful hymn to troilist malarky, “Two Ladies”, is flayed within an inch of its life, as Dreyfus and his girls reveal their bottoms in the stand-up bed then go bonkers with innuendo, rubber willies, nightcaps and simulated sex games, leaving the song gasping for life on the floor.

Some critics have blathered defensively about Minnelli being too good as Sally, making the point that the character is a posh girl whose hedonism obliterates what tiny talent she might have. That sort of comes across with Anna Maxwell Martin, but the point about playing the trumpet badly is that you have to be able to play it in the first place. She simply doesn’t have the technique or lung power for either the great steaming torch song “Maybe This Time” or the title number, alone in her room. And for “Don’t Tell Mama” you need comic bite as well as insouciance, and all Maxwell Martin has is a feeble joke, half-dressed as a nun that makes its crude point several times over before the lyric does.

The first London Sally, Judi Dench, was a gin-sodden croaker with a background problem, while other London Sallys – Kelly Hunter and best of all Jane Horrocks in the Sam Mendes Donmar revival – conveyed the inner turmoil while delivering the vocal goods. The Mendes production did what this version signally fails to do – spice up the action, make the political points but retain the inherent joy and vitality of a good musical. Alan Cumming’s Emcee became the whole show.

At least the wonderful Sheila Hancock as the lonely landlady Fraulein Schneider gives the musical some kind of still centre, and she's touchingly squired by Geoffrey Hutchings with his pineapple. Michael Hayden seems unnecessarily vacuous as Clifford, while James Dreyfus appears increasingly embarrassed by his cornucopia of camp gags and face-pulls.

- Michael Coveney