CULTURE
Maybe This Time
Brian Finnegan reviews the West End musical revival of Kander and Ebb's Cabaret, currently showing at the Gaiety.
The trouble with reviving musicals that have already been turned into classic films is that an audience will always mentally reference the movie version when watching the new stage version. Kander and Ebb's Cabaret is a very difficult beast in this regard. Bob Fosse's 1975 film not only got rid of most of the stage version's songs and a major storyline, it also made a star out of Liza Minnelli, who has been so closely identified with Cabaret's central character, Sally Bowles ever since, it's been hard to tell the two apart.
Bill Kenwright's West End revival of Cabaret, the touring version of which is at the Gaiety in Dublin until October 24, takes its cue from the mega-successful revival of Kander and Ebb's other most well-known show, Chicago. The set is minimal, the costumes (well, most of them) are cut from the same body-hugging cloth, and the performances are coreographed to exude erotic tension. The difference between Chicago and Cabaret, though, is that the latter is a much more old-fashioned show, written ten years earlier, and it doesn't always fit into the new wardrobe its been given.
Set in Berlin in 1931, on the cusp of the end of the permissive Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, Cabaret is told from the point of view of Clifford Bradshaw, an American bisexual abroad who gets involved with Sally Bowles, a flamboyant, ambitious singer at the Kit Kat Club. Around their fleeting romance revolves the lives of the inhabitants of Fraulein Schneider's boarding house, where Clifford rents a room.
The action is punctuated with numbers from the Kit Kat Club's Emcee, who serves as a constant metaphor for the current state of society throughout the show. In this production the Emcee is played by Wayne Sleep, who is well-known to one generation as the star of BBC's The Hot Shoe Show and another as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing. With none of the menace of Joel Grey's Emcee in the movie version or the defiant sexuality of Alan Cumming's take in the first version of this revival on Broadway, Sleep's Emcee is a cute, mischevious, spritely Puck, punctuating the action with a flourish here, a tap-dance there, and a constant cheeky grin.
It's not a bad choice. Sleep is certainly able to get a laugh out of the audience, hits all the right notes with his many songs, and never fails to give it his all. There is, however, a weird moment when he slips out of character to become cute, mischevious Wayne Sleep, bringing the audience in on a joke about being an aging dancer. It's all a bit more nudge-nudge, wink-wink British Music Hall than Weimar Republic cabaret.
At the beginning of the show, Sally gets fired from the Kit Kat Club, which means that she and Emcee never get to sing together, as they did in the movie. This is a big pity, since the powerhouse vocals of Siobhan Dillon are the glue that hold this production together and pairing her with Sleep would have provided her with much-needed comic relief.
Her three recognisable numbers, 'Mein Herr', 'Maybe This Time' and 'Cabaret' are showstoppers in the best traditional sense of the word, the first coreographed in constant motion on a moving staircase, making good use of the talented, buffed-up chorus. Dillon plays Sally as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown at all times, a desperate, frenetic thing who never stops moving and wants to be anywhere but where she is. She's heading into a life of obscurity as Clifford's wife and mother of his child, rather than that of a star, which is where her heart defiantly is.
Sally sings 'Cabaret' just before heading off to have an abortion, effectively putting an end to her affair with Clifford, and Dillon's brilliant delivery veres from a heartbreaking, broken and frightened wail to a bold, sassy statement of empowerment in the face of dark forces. She certainly makes the part her own; Liza doesn't get a look-in with this Sally.
The dark forces, of course, are the Nazis, and its here that the show encounters most of its problems. The focus of their anti-Semitism is Herr Schultz, a Jewish boarder in Fraulein Schneider's boarding house who is in love with the landlady. The blossoming of their autumnal romance is played out over a number of songs that are quietly moving but ultimately jarring. The film wisely turned this romance into a younger, more impetuous story with no songs attached, placing Sally at the fulcrum of its ultimate downfall.
In this mix, however, two lovers in their seventies hardly gel with all the ass-slapping, crotch-grabbing, super-stylised sexual shenanigans going on around them and Sally is a mere bystander looking on as old Fraulein Schneider weighs up her options in the face of the Third Reich.
The Nazis too are less than convincing. The key song that announces their rise to power, 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me', has a strange otherworldliness to it, and the scenes of brutality take place with characters we don't care about, the insipid Clifford included. Maybe if we saw the brownshirts beat Herr Schultz up, the message might have been driven home more effectively and emotively.
Having said that, if you thought the film version of Cabaret was dark, you ain't seen nothing yet. Liza Minnelli's performance underpinned the movie with a stubborn, indomitable sense of optimism. The Nazis might be coming, but when Liza belted out the film's theme song, we knew they would be eventually defeated. There is no such sense of relief here. The show ends on a blacker than black note with the entire chorus stripped bare in a pastiche of lifeless bodies thrown against each other.
Life is a cabaret, old chum? I don't think so.
Cabaret is at the Gaiety Theatre until October 24, tickets €25, €27.50, €35, €40, €50, €55 and €60 from (01) 677 1717 or www.gaietytheatre.com