Some plays, like
old friends, just never go away, and the
space between play revivals can be remarkably short or lengthy. South Pacific took over
sixty years to return to Broadway, but La Cage Aux Folles and
Guys and Dolls have had multiple
revivals and the former has won three Best Revival Tony awards. Just
last month
Edward Albee’s seminal play Who’s Afraid
of Virginia Woolf? re-opened fifty years to the day it first
graced
Broadway, even though it had a smashing revival seven years ago with
Kathleen
Turner and Bill Irwin. When a play is that good, it never seems to
outstay its
welcome.
Cabaret, one such play, opened in 1966 and has enjoyed
a
sensational life on stage and in film. I was privileged enough to see
it three
separate times and all three shows have been a revelation. A few years
after
the 1998 stunning, sleazy revival starring the late Natasha Richardson
and Alan
Cumming, a national tour came to Lafayette’s Heymann
Performing Arts
center. Once one gets past the heightened level of raunchiness—several
elderly ladies
sitting in front of me left after intermission—the audience got a full
dose of
the horrors of the Nazi regime in this haunting production. In 2007, I
attended
a West End production that
proved beyond any doubt that lightning
doesn’t always strike twice. In a misguided attempt to revitalize the
play, the
British production threw in copious amounts of gratuitous nudity, not
trusting
that the Nazi horrors were sensational enough to sustain a play. That
revival got
mixed reviews, and somehow managed to run for two years, when it
mercifully closed.
So I approached
the Cité des Arts revival, directed by
Christy Leichty, with apprehension. The space is mercilessly small for
so grand
a musical and having seen two wildly different productions, I wanted to
preserve the memory of the Lafayette tour. The 1998
show also
called for the actors to play their own instruments on stage, a recent
trend
particular to Sondheim revivals. Would the Lafayette actors play
instruments,
would there be a band, and if so, where would it be on that tiny stage?
Amazingly this Cité production utilized the space well and wisely
blended
choreography and singing with the human element so crucial to the
play’s
longevity.
Kander and Ebb’s
musical has a rich dichotomy, which
juxtaposes nicely with 1930s Berlin. Songs in the
seedy nightclub
are exciting, even liberating, but songs in the boarding house reflect
the
brutal realities of life. In the Kit Kat Klub, there exudes a “no
worries”
attitude symbolized by the song “Wilkommen,” even though all the
characters in
the boarding house are suffering the effects of the Great Depression.
Like
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Mask of the Red Death,” the Kit Kat Klub tries
to
isolate itself from the dual assaults from the Depression and the
National
Socialists who are rising in power. Under the Weimar Republic, Germany’s government
from 1918 until
1934, Germany also experienced
a social
upheaval that permitted sexual license in social clubs like the Kit Kat
Klub.
That licentiousness exhilarated younger Germans after decades of
repression
under the Kaiser, but it horrified the older generations who looked for
anyone
to save them from this social revolution, even if that someone came in
the form
of Hitler and his Nazis. Scenes continuously alternate between the
free-wheeling Klub to the ever-depressing boarding house.
A train whistle
introduces us to Clifford Bradshaw (Aren
Chaisson), an American author who befriends Ernst Ludwig (T. Chase
Nelson), a
beguiling creature who not only refers Bradshaw to the boarding house
run by
Fraulein Schneider (Amanda Newbery), but also offers him various quick
errands
for tantalizing amounts of money (think money laundering for Nazis.)
Bradshaw
visits the Kit Kat Klub, where he runs into both the high-spirited
Sally Bowles
(Jessica Jouclard) and a former lover of his from Britain named Bobby
(Ricky Rowan).
Moving from lover to lover, Sally moves in with Cliff in the small, one
bedroom
apartment in Fraulein Schneider’s hotel, even becoming Cliff’s lover
along the way.
Once rich but now poor, Fraulein Schneider perseveres in Teutonic form
as her
once fashionable establishment transforms into something akin to a
brothel. One
of her tenants, Fraulein Kost (Caroline Helm), constantly refers to
some
visiting sailor as her “cousin,” or more ironically, “her brother,”
even as he
gropes her in a most un-brotherly manner. The only light in Fraulein
Schneider’s day comes from the tender attentions paid by a local Jewish
fruit
vendor, Herr Schultz (Milton Resweber). Schneider’s impending marriage
to
Schultz alienates German society just as the Nazis ascend to power, and
this
dramatic tension exposes the ugly side of Nazi Germany as it hardened
in its
fixation against Jews. Eventually even Cliff cannot tolerate the
twisted distortions
surrounding him and he escapes back to America, a luxury not
available to
many Europeans at that time.
Joel Grey, now
eighty and still performing, originated the
role of the Emcee to androgynous perfection, earning the coveted Tony,
Oscar,
Golden Globe, and Grammy awards for that one role. In 1998 Alan Cumming
chose a
more sordid interpretation and captured a Tony award as well. I was
curious to
see what path Travis Guillory would carve with his portrayal and there
was a
steady, rather remarkable restraint to his Emcee. Garishly made up in
harsh
tones of white and rouge, he begins as the epitome of ennui and
devolves into a
haggard human, with the makeup disappearing to reveal a dazed man
concussed
first by the Depression, then by the Nazis. Somehow that middle path
between
Grey and Cumming works for Guillory, who uses his vocal talents to sell
songs
like “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” and “Wilkommen.” Guillory
also
choreographed the dancing, which the cabaret girls along with Andre
Guillory and
the incredibly expressive Ricky Rowan executed nicely though not always
uniformly, but that wasn’t the point. If it had been perfect, these
girls and
guys wouldn’t be in the squalid club.
Even though Cabaret revolves
around the Emcee, Sally Bowles, and Clifford Bradshaw, nicely played by
Aren
Chaisson, the heart of the play comes from its touching subplot
involving
Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz. Amanda Newbery and Milton
Resweber, both
veterans, play the middle-aged lovers who find each other only to lose
each
other when faced with the harsh reality of Nazi Germany. Their initial
romantic
gestures revolve around gifts of fruit—the song “It Couldn’t Please Me
More”
about a pineapple is simultaneously funny and moving—and their romance
blossoms
into questions of matrimony with the poignant “Marriage.” When she
frets over
what will become of them as they age, or as they face the growing Nazi
threat,
he tells her warmly, “I will catch you. I promise.” A perfect couple on
stage,
their subsequent break-up is all the more heart-wrenching because they
brought
pathos to their characters.
This sensational
play suffers in some areas. While Caroline
Helm has a wonderfully expressive face that is fascinating to watch on
stage,
the orchestra and the chorus overpowered her in the song “Money,” which
is so
fast that it must be heard clearly to appreciate its decadent humor.
Transfering that “Money” song from the Emcee to Fraulein Kost defies
logic as
Kost is not a character in the Kit Kat Klub, and the puppet (Charlotte
Leavitt)
singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” doesn’t quite work either, though not
due to
any fault in Ms. Leavitt’s singing. The song originally called for a
bevy of
waiters doing wonderful harmonies, but alas, there weren’t enough males
in the
cast. The proximity of the audience makes the fight scene with Bradshaw
particularly unconvincing; what looks effective from a balcony looks
patently
false in an eight row theatre. There aren’t enough white lights in Cité
to
light the entire stage, so some actors plunge into darkness, resembling
Bela Lugosi
shying away from the sunlight. The play also suffers slightly at the
end of
each act. Act I has a shivering song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which
somehow
felt muted and not nearly as menacing as it should have been. The cast
is
singing what seems like an innocuous song about the Rhineland, but its
patriotic overtones
will become slavish servitude to the Third Reich. Resweber and Newbery
nicely
register the concern on their faces, but Leichty could have exaggerated
the
hyper-nationalism more on the remaining cast members’ faces, symbolic
of the
ugliness that can surface when all restraints are removed from human
nature.
There is nothing Leichty could have done with that clumsy end to Act
II, where
characters return to repeat their lines just in case the audience
forgot the
last two hours. It’s an unfortunate case of the authors’ not trusting
an
audience to understand the message, which was wordlessly captured by
the
closing scene.
Many, not all, of
those faults evaporate in the presence of
the Jessica Jouclard. As Sally Bowles, she exudes an electrifying
energy, and from
her entrance to her final scene, it’s as if the lights become slightly
brighter
and the play pulses with greater intensity. The role made a star of
Liza
Minelli, and Jouclard, having played the role before, descends from
dizzying
enthusiasm to harrowing disillusion. When Jouclard sings the rousing
title
song, she mirrors that dichotomy mentioned earlier: her words are
exuberant, ecstatic
even, but her face is tormented and pallid. “This is a fiction,” Sally
once
says with outspread arms to Cliff, but in reality, Jouclard’s arms are
for us,
drawing us into her fiction and never letting us go.
Vincent P. Barras
No comments:
Post a Comment