CABARET. In rep. to 5 October.
Chichester
CABARET
by Joe Masteroff and Fred Ebb, music by John Kander, from a play by John van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood
Chichester Festival Theatre In rep to 5October 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 50min One interval
TICKETS 01243 781312
Review Timothy Ramsden 31 July
A bright and lively, if slightly soulless production.They're all here: suspenders, stockings, swastikas and songs. Chichester's stage and Roger Redfarn's staging give Bill Deamer's choreography scope in the crazy Kit-Kat world of seamy, steamy sexuality.
Outside, on the fire-escape muscular young men in vests sing of their new model Germany in the Nazi hymn 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me'. The staging contrasts two co-existing worlds and hints at the poverty where discontent is sown.
Inside, Julian Bleach's Emcee revels in mockery of Hitler youth-style physical health culture through a three-in-a-bedroom romp with physical jerks round a phallic vaulting-horse. Bleach's angry sneer and gravel/rasp voice (uncomfortably inaudible in lower vocal phrases) shout defiance against society. It's a dangerous camp to be in – where does satire end? His famous number with a gorilla-lover ('If you could see her with my eyes, She wouldn't look Jewish at all') ends with the couple draped in a huge swastika and followed offstage by a chorus of saluting actor-Nazis.
For style counts more than politics: Alexandra Jay's Sally Bowles is an apolitical twit, but she's divinely English. Poverty not politics leads to her outburst in her final 'Come to the Cabaret' when she's exchanged her fur-coat for an abortion and freezes alongside the huddled Germans seen at the close. Cabaret is escape, but only for a time.
Bob Fosse's 1972 film focused on the Kit Kat Club. The stage musical foregrounds home life, especially the tender love of lonely old landlady Fraulein Schneider and the fruiterer Herr Schulz. It's here the production doesn't measure up to some recent stagings.
Sarah Badel's torment has a great distance to carry; it loses the desolation-to-the-core of Ann Louise Ross slumped in a chair at Dundee Rep. In the act one finale-Reprise of 'Tomorrow' Redfarn has the Jewish Schultz awkwardly talking side-stage. More devastatingly, at Dundee Schultz – who prides himself on being utterly German – joined in the Nazi salute as his echt German intended sat devastated. In Newbury, John Doyle's outstanding Watermill production made Karen Mann's defeated Schneider the centre of an explosive evening.
Still, Chichester has a fair amount to offer – especially if you go for the cabaret.
Cliff Bradshaw: William Rycroft
Ernst Ludwig: Richard Laing
Fraulein Schneider: Sarah Badel
Fraulein Kost/Kit Kat Girl: Tessa Pritchard
Herr Schultz: Brian Greene
Emcee: Julian Bleach
Sally Bowles: Alexandra Jay
Kit Kat Boy/Customs Officer/Sailor: Steven Fawell
Kit Kat Boy/Sailor: Matt Dempsey
Kit Kat Boy/Vikki: William Maidwell
Kit Kat Boy/Taxi Man: David Ball
Kit Kat Boy/Max/Sailor: Paul Milton
Kit Kat Girls: Charlie Bull, Anna Carmichael, Lucy Holloway, Pauline Stringer, Barbara Tartaglia
Kit Kat Club Customers: Roger Booth, Pete Coxon, Paul Newton-Smith, Luke Osborne, Harry Page, Ken Smith
Director: Roger Redfarn
Lighting: Chris Scott
Sound: Scott George
Costumes: Angela Davies/Mark Bouman
Choreography: Bill Deamer
Musical Director: Garth Hall
Fight director: Terry King
2002-08-01 15:37:39