Cabaret
By Albert Williams
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One thing’s for sure: this isn’t your mother’s Cabaret. Or Harold Prince’s or Bob Fosse’s, though it couldn’t exist without them. Thirty seasons after it first played Chicago–also at the Shubert, in the fall of 1968–this brilliant musical-theater landmark has been radically reworked. The provocative result–dark, stark, spare, unabashedly sexual yet almost never erotic–is the creation of an imaginative, risk-taking British director, Sam Mendes, working in collaboration with choreographer and codirector Rob Marshall, musical supervisor Patrick Vaccariello, and the show’s authors, playwright Joe Masteroff and songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb. Mendes’s Cabaret both draws on and turns against familiar elements of the work’s previous incarnations. Forget the preening, puppetlike emcee Joel Grey created in Prince’s 1966 Broadway premiere and Fosse’s 1972 movie version, with his garishly colored clown makeup and almost infantile sexuality; as played here by the wonderful Norbert Leo Butz, the character is a carnal monster who struts bare chested with a rock star’s arrogance, leering at the audience as he puts a crudely sexual spin on the last word of his famous catchphrase: “Meine Dammen und Herren, mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen…” Forget too the Rubenesque voluptuousness and bravura vocal talent Liza Minnelli brought to the movie role of Sally Bowles, the nightclub singer who belts out the show’s title tune; Teri Hatcher’s Sally is stick thin and fragile, a jittery cokehead who has to clutch her mike stand to keep from keeling over as she stutters through the song. The Kit Kat Klub chorines are underwear-clad zombies, mirthless mannequins parading emotionlessly through Marshall’s crotch-thrusting, finger-sucking, thigh-stroking, fanny-spanking choreography. More clearly than ever before, Sally’s relationship with Clifford Bradshaw, the young tourist whose moral outrage at the rise of Nazism gives the story its center, is doomed not only by her essential frivolity but by his fast-emerging homosexuality. Forget divine decadence; this Cabaret is a study in depravity and decay, where rampant sex is a function not of pleasure but of hunger and desperation.
More than ever, Cabaret is the emcee’s show–whether he’s inviting audience members of both genders onto the stage to dance with him, celebrating the pleasures of sexual sandwiches in “Two Ladies” (this time one of the “ladies” is a man, and the singers cavort in silhouetted sex that includes pretty explicit simulations of cock sucking and fist fucking), or forcing the Kit Kat Girls into a series of degrading postures to demonstrate the power of “Money” (Marshall’s sexually brutal staging of this song is radically different from Grey and Minnelli’s campy film version). So it’s fitting that the emcee is the last person we see before the lights go out: in an image that recalls Martin Sherman’s Holocaust drama Bent, he hangs lifeless against the throbbing glare of a humming electric fence, dressed in a prison uniform adorned with both a yellow star and a pink triangle.
Allen has a gift for the flow of dialogue and an off-kilter sense of humor–the conversations between Dotha, Mark, Mark’s wife Miriam, and Dotha’s daughter Ora are peppered with quirky trivia about details of the characters’ lives. And her desire to candidly portray the infirmities and anxieties of old age is admirable. But none of this can disguise the fundamental manipulativeness of this schematic story, with its pat parallels and overstated metaphors. Winter “is the season of death” and “we’re in the winter of our lives,” says Harris toward the end, as if we couldn’t figure out the seasonal symbolism when she gazes out an invisible window at a snowstorm. It takes actors of conviction and understated intensity to deliver lines like this; Allen is lucky to have Harris and Mike Nussbaum as Dotha and Mark, and Nancy Lollar and Meg Thalken delivering solid support as Miriam and Ora under Sandy Shinner’s direction. Harris, of course, carries an extra resonance that stems from our memories of her in movies such as I Am a Camera, The Haunting, and The Member of the Wedding (with her hair cropped short she looks eerily like the young tomboy she played in that film version of Carson McCullers’s play). Her presence on an off-Loop stage is a major theater event. Too bad the play isn’t.
