Cabaret
Cabaret
Posted: 11 Oct 2009
Cabaret, Newcastle Theatre Royal
For most of us, the first experience of Cabaret is the much-acclaimed 1972 film.
A winner of eight Oscars and oozing star turns, it leaves you wondering what, as a stage show, it will offer. And how do you follow an act like Liza Minnelli?
The answer is to go back to the original concept in which Sally Bowles (Minnelli in the film, Samantha Barks here) is an English woman – still glitzy but less Hollywood – and her bisexual lover Cliff an American.
The stage show also reinstates the romantic subplot featuring the feisty ageing landlady Fraulein Schneider and her Jewish suitor Herr Schultz which adds a poignancy and a sense of doom as well as some numbers missing from the film such as So What? and What Would You Do? – songs about acceptance and resignation which wouldn’t sit well on younger shoulders and which give the plot a broader dimension.
Of course the spectacle of the cabaret at the Kit Kat club in “tawdry and terrible” Berlin is what most people buy the ticket for and it does not disappoint.
The choreography is slick and more louche than in the film, and Wayne Sleep as Emcee (he was surely born for this role) exudes menace as well as decadence.
I found this less glamorous and darker than the film – the ending in which the club’s dancers are transformed into naked prisoners of war hits the political point home harder, too. It feels more real, and is all the better for it.
AG
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