Jon Peterson as the Emcee and the 2017 National Touring cast of Roundabout Theatre Company’s CABARET. Photo by Joan Marcus.
By DCist contributor Peter Tabakis
Cabaret is an impatient show. Before it commences, impossibly attractive cast members loiter onstage as the orchestra warms up and we settle down in our seats. Uniformly costumed—sheer negligees for the women, shirtless black suits for the men—they smoke cigarettes, stretch their well-toned figures, and chat with one another. Some flirtatious attention is sent our way. Nasty glances shame those who make the mistake of snapping cellphone photos. The house lights go down. A snare drum rolls and a cymbal crashes. And then—once we’re beckoned toward center stage, by a hand whose forefinger executes a tantalizing, come-hither gesture—the show begins.
That finger belongs to Cabaret’s fascistic Master of Ceremonies (played by Jon Peterson, an imp who becomes progressively pitiful). During the exhilarating opening number, he welcomes us to the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy nightclub in decaying Weimar Berlin. “Willkommen” is both a rousing start and a false promise. True to the Emcee’s word, the club abounds with beauty: its girls, its boys, even its orchestra. But his claim that “life is beautiful,” here of all places, falls apart as the show unfolds.
Peterson’s Emcee is an omnipresent onlooker, one who accompanies us through Cabaret’s two tenuous courtships. The first is between queer American novelist Cliff Bradshaw (Benjamin Eakeley) and Sally Bowles, an untalented English chanteuse (Leigh Ann Larkin). Cliff may be a harmless blank, but Sally, the so-called “Toast of Mayfair,” is already past her prime. An elderly German couple (Scott Robertson and Mary Gordon Murray), the second pairing who constitute the show’s true romance, is just as doomed, but for different reasons. Herr Schultz (Robertson) is a Jew, and Fräulein Schneider (Murray) isn’t. You do the political math.
Through song and dance, Cabaret dramatizes a willing blindness to the oncoming Nazi horror. A curtain of tinsel shields its characters’ eyes, and ours, too. We’re all in on the fun, until a harsh hangover sets in. This reality check arrives at the Kennedy Center and duplicates, beat for beat, the celebrated 1998 Broadway revival of Cabaret staged at Studio 54, by Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall.
Having seen this production several times over the years, once with Neil Patrick Harris as the Emcee, I can say this is the finest cast of Cabaret I’ve encountered. Peterson, inhabiting Alan Cumming’s lascivious Emcee, offers a dose of Joel Grey’s lilting, meticulous vocal delivery. Larkin is almost too good a singer to play Sally. Eakeley’s Cliff, a do-gooder caught in a nightmare, is soulful yet helpless. But it’s the show’s oldest stars, Mary Gordon Murray and Scott Robertson, who shine brightest. They temper Cabaret’s debauchery with humanity and pathos.
Chicago, which recently visited the Kennedy Center with Brandy as its headliner, is a sister show to Cabaret. Both are the gimlet-eyed products of John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics). Chicago endures, germane as ever, because of its exploration of celebrity culture. Cabaret had its Broadway premiere in 1966, and in it we can see the complacent class and nationalistic president of our current moment. Chicago has a gloomy tone, but Cabaret is downright bleak, even with its vaudevillian celebrations and stunning ballads.
As the show progresses, the songs become increasingly ominous. They feel relevant. How can you hear “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” a chauvinist hymn sung twice in Cabaret, and not shiver? The reprise of “Married,” with its shattered storefront window, and the ugly “If You Could See Her,” both filled with racism and anti-Semitism, elicit dread. Cabaret’s title number, so joyous, is an anthem of futility.
The second time we hear “Willkommen,” it’s now, as Cliff says, “the end of the world.” A snare drum rolls and a cymbal crashes. The house lights come up. This terrific musical may be over, but we exit the theater having experienced something all too real.
Cabaret is at the Kennedy Center through August 6. $59-149. Buy tickets here.
