The Delirious Triumph of Sally Bowles: Cabaret Review

Hopefully, all had a fun and safe holiday; mine was at least the former, as I spent the night after New Year’s at Cabaret, the enduring monument to lurid extravagance located in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s Studio 54, and about three degrees south of damnation.

As the remounted production of the iconic John Kander and Fred Ebb musical about a sordid Berlin nightclub that welcomed its own new year in 1930, as well as the Nazis, Cabaret has gained special new attention with the arrival of Emma Stone as Sally Bowles. For the coveted role, she is making her Broadway debut dressed to the nines (or undressed) while next to Alan Cumming as the perennial face of Weimar Germany and a black hole that consumes all in its orbit—much like the show with its come-hither stare.

Working from a book by Joe Masteroff, which was in turn adapted from both John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera and Christopher Isherwood’s semiautobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, Cabaret conjures up the story of American novelist Cliff Bradshaw (Bill Heck) coming to Berlin to write, but instead bearing witness to the toxic rise of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Unfortunately, Cliff hardly notices such frivolities when he has sensual fantasias to attend to like the Kit Kat Klub, a German underworld ruled by a garish Master of Ceremonies (Cumming) and which, for at least New Year’s Eve, stars a British transplant and the toast of Mayfair: Miss Sally Bowles.

A self-professed actress and singer, Sally (Stone) makes it very clear early on that she prefers auditioning on a couch and eventually Cliff’s bed when she needs a new apartment. Yet, the only thing unbelievable about this charmingly flighty new roommate is how easy it is for Cliff (and the most naive of audiences) to fall in love with her—a sentiment about as evergreen as the friendly Herr Schultz’s (Danny Burstein) insistence that he is a German first and a Jew second. Both romantic assertions are immediately questioned by Schultz’s nervous fiancée Fraulein Schneider (Linda Emond), and all of it falls by the wayside while under the spell of the Emcee’s intoxicating sexcapades, as well as Stone’s impressive vocals that ring passionately (if not deafeningly) with an English affectation.

Admittedly, I did not see Michelle Williams’ interpretation of Sally Bowles, but having enjoyed several Sallys belt their way to a gin-soaked Hell in the past, I can still say that there’s a unique fire burning in Ms. Stone’s realization of the third-rate lounge singer, and it’s a shade redder than her hair.

Perhaps getting closer in some ways to the real 19-year-old woman who inspired Christopher Isherwood’s infatuation, the youthfulness of Ms. Stone accentuates the tragedy of her predestined end of “going like Elsie.” And the actress embraces Sally’s bitter lust for self-destruction with a delirious triumph of anger, which erupts for her best musical moments: “Mein Herr” and the titular “Cabaret.” Her Sally has no illusions about her choices; she’s instead a firecracker of manic joy that’s all too aware of the coming sorrow. During those songs, where Stone and Bowles are in a perfectly marvelous harmony of lording over a dingy stage’s microphone, they’re both musing with a blind rage befitting Sally’s new adopted homeland.

Of course that homeland is now a constant fixture at the Roundabout Theatre Company and Studio 54, which has been wallowing in the seedy Kit Kat Klub for nearly a generation. Since 1998, Cabaret has had an on-again off-again affair with the venue, and as still co-directed by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall (who between them have film credits that include American Beauty, Skyfall, and Into the Woods), the production is as wonderfully lascivious as ever.

Robert Brill’s stage and club design once more extends into the orchestra section, which is ornamented with nightclub tables and lamps. The effect lulls the audience into believing that they have stumbled into the post-Weimar abyss, and is probably the closest thing to a night of sin one is likely to find in the increasingly family friendly Great White Way; yet, these audience luxuries ultimately resemble one more prop for Alan Cumming, who after 21 years since first playing the Master of Ceremonies in London, appears to be having just as much fun now at prodding the audience like a demonic jester beckoning toward the fall.

Joel Grey originated the role of the Emcee, which won him both a Tony and an Oscar. However, Grey’s iconic portrayal of an androgynous dandy has been thoroughly supplanted for modern theatergoers by the far viler Cumming. Indeed, he continues to devour the stage like a pansexual omnivore with a taste for chaos. William Ivey Long’s costume designs are best showcased on Ms. Stone and the Cabaret girls, but it is on Cumming where they most cling, as he looks ready to rip it all off at any moment.

The more insidious nature of Mendes and Marshall’s revival, which makes significant changes to Masteroff’s book, continues to amuse and cajole audiences to lurid distraction, drawing parallels with modern holidays taken while the political winds blow increasingly harder to the right. All of the potency of Isherwood’s original intent remains in tact, and may even be heightened since the gaudiness of this Cabaret can only find ephemeral ease in the nigh waltz of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a Kander and Ebb reimagining of Hitler Youth songs. The horror of a decadent culture only discovering harmonious peace in this backdrop remains one of theatre’s most visceral nightmares.

And yet, there is no peace for Sally Bowles, who as played by Emma Stone, fiercely rejects with unhinged glee the idea of there even being a tomorrow. But there will be, and hopefully you’ll be able to spend it at the corner table of her Kit Kat Klub before the curtains closes on the whole damned lot.

***Also Feel free to give me a call, old chum, about musicals, your favorite Sally Bowles, and all that jazz by following me on Twitter with @DCrowsNest.