‘CABARET’ REVIEW: EDDIE REDMAYNE TAKES THE KIT KAT’S STAGE

New York

Even the most decadent denizens of Berlin in the Weimar era—such as a sinewy androgyne presiding as the Emcee at a nightclub where anything goes, sexually speaking—prove to be susceptible to the poisonous seductions of the ascendant Nazis in the theatrically sizzling if emotionally tepid Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”

Most New York theatergoers probably saw the last Broadway production, which opened in 1998, had a phenomenal six-year run, and then returned in 2014. The new version, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, arrives on a tide of ecstatic reviews from London, bringing along its marquee star, Oscar and Tony winner Eddie Redmayne, who plays that Emcee, and won an Olivier Award for the performance.

It is styled as “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” with the theater reconfigured to resemble the nightspot where the Emcee presides over a gaudy floorshow starring the British singer Sally Bowles, played by Gayle Rankin, accompanied by a small chorus flaunting their flesh and their raw sexuality.

But didn’t that last revival take a similar semi-immersive approach, with some of the audience seated at tables near the stage, where they sipped cocktails while imbibing the heady atmosphere, as they can in the new version? And when it opened at the now-demolished Henry Miller’s Theatre, that venue was renamed the Kit Kat Club, too.

True, the new production takes the gambit further, adding pre-show entertainment in three lavishly redecorated bars, a sideshow before the big-top attraction. But Ms. Frecknall’s aggressively louche production still feels like a more saturated version of the prior one.

The musical is staged on a circular platform. The numbers performed at the club—the celebrated opener, “Willkommen”; “Don’t Tell Mama”; “Mein Herr”—and the scenes set in the boarding house of Fraulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth) all take place on this largely bare stage, suggesting the walls between the nocturnal world, where customers flout society’s prevailing norms, and the increasingly repressive culture outside are more porous than one might suppose.

Mr. Redmayne lives up to his London acclaim, giving a savory, seductive performance as the Emcee. Moving with an almost reptilian slither, he presides over the show with an air of preening insouciance, and sings in a sharp-edged tenor that gives full due to John Kander and Fred Ebb’s enduringly brilliant score.

The Emcee’s costumes, by Tom Scutt, reflect a stylized, 21st-century sensibility—less 1920s Berlin than contemporary fashion runway. Mr. Redmayne opens the show wearing a knit vest with a frilly tie and a blood-red leather skirt, a tiny cone-shaped hat affixed at a jaunty angle to his copper-colored wig. The outfits grow more outlandish, as when he emerges in a skin-tight black ensemble studded with silver buttons, a World War I helmet on his head, and long, deadly-looking fingernails. He looks like a horror-movie monster.

Ms. Rankin’s Sally radiates a defensive aggressiveness, as if she feels always on the verge of having the rug of life swept away from beneath her—as it is when she is fired, and forces herself on the bewildered good will of an American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood), whom she has only just met, insisting on moving in with him at Fraulein Schneider’s.

Their unlikely romance—Cliff is attracted to men as well as women—unfortunately feels entirely artificial. Ms. Rankin’s sometimes shrill, peremptory Sally, exuding the vulnerability of an armored tank, and Mr. Blankson-Wood’s stiff Cliff are a glaring mismatch; they have all the chemistry of an empty test tube.

This leaves an emotional void that is thankfully filled by the romance between Fraulein Schneider and another boarder, the Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Steven Skybell), who woos her with gentle courtliness. Both bruised by life, they nevertheless are increasingly drawn together. Ms. Neuwirth renders her character’s ambivalence but also her undeniable yearning for a refuge from the world’s storms with exquisite delicacy. Mr. Skybell’s warmth and ardent devotion are likewise affecting. The wry song “Married” marks the show’s unlikely emotional highlight—with the terrific Natascia Diaz, as the prostitute Fraulein Kost, another boarder, haunting the stage as she sings the woman’s verses, expressing her own desperate longing for safe harbor.

Among Ms. Frecknall’s innovations is an emphasis on dance, with Julia Cheng’s choreography making inventive use of the stage space as the club performers romp, stomp and shimmy around Mr. Redmayne, engaging in ribald movement that at one point includes such unlikely sexually tinged props as a whisk and a toilet plunger. Their thickly applied makeup, skimpy costumes—a green macramé bikini?—and multicolored hair are suggestive more of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” than a seedy European club of the period, but they undoubtedly add to the show’s arresting visual allure.

More provocative is the depiction of the Emcee. Midway through the first act he sings the disturbingly lovely “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a coded celebration of Aryan culture. This is a departure not just from the original but from the aforementioned Broadway revival, in which Alan Cumming’s Emcee was revealed, at the close, wearing the uniform of a concentration camp prisoner.

Whether Ms. Frecknall’s choice makes sense may be disputed. In any case, if the Emcee were moonlighting as a milquetoast-looking Nazi sympathizer, when not flouncing around the Kit Kat Club with epicene abandon, his flawless imitation of a social rebel would be worthy of whatever the Weimar equivalent of a Tony Award might be.

Mr. Isherwood is the Journal’s theater critic.

2024-04-22T01:42:55Z dg43tfdfdgfd