In his 2017 memoir Sense of Occasion, Harold Prince, who directed the 1966 production of Cabaret, reflects on the Kander and Ebb musical’s legacy. “In the 50 years since Cabaret premiered,” he writes, “sadly I still believe ‘it can happen here.’ Maybe wherever human beings live, it can happen. We have to accept that possibility. If so, how damned sad.”
Perhaps that’s why, in Rebecca Frecknall’s impressive fresh-from-London Broadway revival, the first glimpse of a swastika—emblazoned on an armband worn by the entrepreneur Ernst (Henry Gottfried)—barely yields a reaction from the audience. But when nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Gayle Rankin) tosses back a prairie oyster—raw egg and Worcestershire sauce, “heaven for a hangover”—the groans and icks come through loud and clear.
Is the idea of consuming an uncooked egg that unsettling? Or have we simply become resigned to the growing presence of fascists in our midst? On social media, on cable news, in elected office…How damned sad indeed.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
Wait! We were supposed to leave our troubles outside. If you haven’t done that by the time the opening number, “Willkommen,” starts, your Emcee—played by Eddie Redmayne in his second Broadway stint (the last being his Tony-winning turn in 2010’s Red) as part clown, part contortionist—commands you to do so: “We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful.”
It’s easy to get caught up in the spell of this Cabaret, which is all about mood from the moment you enter down a dumpster-lined alley (we promise, it gets prettier). The creators have devised a 75-minute prologue with bars on every floor, original music, and performers in various nooks and crannies. (Alaïa, Iron Bryan, Will Ervin Jr., Sun Kim, and Deja McNair are the dancers and Brian Russell Carey, Francesca Dawis, Maeve Stier, and Michael Winograd the musicians credited.) Be sure to leave yourself time to enjoy at least part of the pre-show, so you can wander through all three levels, each assigned a decidedly different look and theme by scenic, theater, and costume designer Tom Scutt; Red Bar gives off a Kubrick vibe, and the Green Bar has a giddy, absinthe-soaked feel. The theater—sorry, the Kit Kat Club—is, indeed, beautiful.
Everything in this Cabaret plays out on a small round central stage: American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood, woefully miscast in a pivotal role), meeting Ernst on a train; the introduction of the Cabaret girls, Rosie (Paige Smallwood), Lulu (David Merino), Frenchie (Gabi Campo), Texas (MiMi Scardulla), Fritzie (Natascia Diaz, who doubles as the sailor-loving Fraulein Kost), and Helga (Ayla Ciccone-Burton), “each and every one a virgin”; all of Sally’s Kit Kat Club performances; Jewish fruit shop owner Herr Schultz (Steven Skybell) wooing landlady Fraulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth) with a pineapple; the engagement party in Herr Schultz’s fruit shop; and more. At first it’s very clear what’s real and what’s just a performance: The Kit Kat girls rotate playfully on a turntable like confections; the Emcee pops up from beneath the stage on a platform wearing a variety of Scutt’s garish get-ups (the best, and most haunting, is the pearl-trimmed skeleton-harlequin hybrid in “Money”). Herr Schultz’s proposal and the love duet, “Married,” must be very real, because Skybell (star of 2018’s Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, directed by the original Emcee, Joel Grey) and Neuwirth, a Tony winner for Kander and Ebb’s 1996 Chicago revival, will bring you to very real tears.
But Frecknall smartly blurs the lines. All we’re really sure of is that we’re in Weimar-era Berlin. When the Emcee sings the echoey, haunting Aryan anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” he’s wandering through some kind of dreamland populated by wooden doll-size white men. In “Maybe This Time,” while Sally imagines another life for herself—“Not a loser anymore/ Like the last time and the time before,” she sings—she’s technically in Cliff’s room, but she’s also in some other liminal space. (The self-searching songs, “Maybe This Time” and “Cabaret,” are Rankin’s most powerful numbers.) At the end of “What Would You Do?,” Fraulein Schneider is singing atop a platform in the middle of the stage. The lamps on the tables are lit—like we’re in the club watching a performance, not the devastation of a woman who’s just traded her happiness to guarantee her survival.
“Where are your troubles now?” asks Redmayne’s shape-shifting Emcee, cowed into submission in the final scene. “Forgotten? I told you so.” Not at all. And thank goodness for that.
Cabaret opened April 21, 2024, at the Kit Kat Club (August Wilson Theatre). Tickets and information: kitkat.club
