March 28, 2008
We Review a Brand-New Cabaret @ the 5th Ave
A loud, garish co-production with American Musical Theatre of San Jose and St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, this Cabaret steers clear of good taste in more ways than one. Its Kit Kat Klub has an authentically German, middlebrow's-night-on-the-town feel. As directed by Billy Berry and choreographed by Bob Richard, the show is miles away from the seventies sleaze of the Bob Fosse film or the sexual apocalypse of the show emceed by Alan Cumming, yet borrows touches from both. (We also liked the faux Burberry outfits for the English schoolgirl skit.)
The big question with Cabaret is whether, in retrospect, you can see the Nazis coming. In other, grimmer productions, the decadence of the Kit Kat Klub has stood in for a culture that allowed Nazis to flourish (or as a free-thinking refuge in that culture). In this 5th Ave production, the Kit Kat Klub is a fun way to spend your evening--entertaining, glamorous, sexy, risque. With no obviously looming threat, life is full of ordinary concerns, nights more carefree. When the Nazi threat appears, he's just a boor at what used to be a wild party; seemingly overnight, he turns into something much worse.
For the story of the romance between young American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Louis Hobson) and cabaret performer Sally Bowles (Tari Kelly), the show skates by on surface appeal. The older couple, Jewish fruit-seller Herr Schultz (Allen Fitzpatrick) and boarding house owner Fraulein Schneider (Suzy Hunt), won over the house with their pineapple duet, but Hobson somehow plays Cliff as a generic bisexual "American naif" and in Kelly's hands Bowles is such a chattering twit (with a unsuccessful English accent), that we never really cared too much about them. Kelly is best singing--she's got a voice that suits a cabaret singer, without the brassiness you hear from most musical ingenues. In the end, you want a Sally Bowles to sell her big tune, and Kelly does.
Tari Kelly (Sally Bowles) and the Kit Kat Klub girls in The 5th Avenue Theatre's production of Cabaret, playing March 25 - April 13, 2008. (Photo: David M. Allen Photography)
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Look at you and all your fancy photos! I like.
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I saw Nick Garrison star in Vera Wilde at the old Empty Space in Fremont. What a performance! I can't wait to see it.
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My biggest problem with this production was PRECISELY the lack of seediness in the club scenes - as I remarked to a friend last evening (and before Misha Berson in the Times iterated exactly the same complaint), "it was as if Weimar Germany had been transported to the show stage of the Bellagio. I suppose, if a typical Berlin cabaret of the late 1920's had had the equivalent of $2 mm to spend on a floor show, this might be a good approximation of what it would have looked like."
Plus, I'm not at all sure what Berry had in mind with the little ballet routine dropped into the first iteration of "Tomorrow Belongs To Me". At first, I thought perhaps it was some sort of reference to Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 "Olympiad" (which would of course have been anachronistic for late 1920's Germany), but when my date burst into uncontrollable laughter, along with a handful of others in the house who just couldn't hold in their reactions, it was pretty clear that, even if that were the case, it completely missed the mark, and instead just turned out silly and incongruous.
And I'll second the kudos to Hunt and Fitzpatrick, a couple of seasoned pros from whom a lot of those youngsters, particularly the non-Seattle members of the cast, could definitely learn a thing or two.
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Hi Comte: Bellagio equals middlebrow, right? I think that I disregarded some of the more out-sized visual gestures (like that absurd Cabaret sign), in favor of the more real-sized performances. But maybe another way to describe the production is that this cabaret is more to Munich's tastes than Berlin's.
I laughed at that ballet number, too, but I actually thought I was supposed to. It seemed an indication of how un-seriously the Nazis were taken early on, they could be spoofed as clumsy and inept.
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I saw the show too, and perhaps you need to realize that this is a show about something, and it's not trying for verisimilitude. The "real" Kit Kat Klub (clever KKK, eh?) in Berlin might have been seedier - but then, it wasn't a Broadway show with a $MM budget, was it? The show is trying to say something, and the glitter helps get the point across.
One of the things I found annoying: the actors don't understand that "Frau" and "Frauelein" are pronounced differently. Most of them said it as "Fraulein"; the man who played the Jewish fruit seller alternated between "Frau" and "Fraue" pronunciation all night. I don't expect them to have German accents. But they should at least attempt to pronounce common German titles correctly.
The Nazi hymn didn't make me laugh - I caught the reference right away to Hitler Jugend and the Joy of Exercise with the young males exercising for the Fuehrer. All they needed was some lights going up to the heavens a la Nuernberg and they would have completed the set.
It was a show, wasn't it? It made you laugh, it made you gasp, it shocked you, revolted you, and entertained you. Perhaps you saw yourself watching the show, applauding the entertainment - and then you thought - so those Weimarians were a lot like us.