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.
