Thursday, February 24, 2000
'Cabaret' stripped of its soul
BY JACKIE DEMALINE
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Concepts don't come any higher than the retooled Cabaret, now uprooted from its sleazy nightclub setting on Broadway and shoe-horned onto pristine proscenium stages for its national tour.
Settled in for a two-week Fifth Third Bank Broadway Series stint at the Aronoff Center, it's no trick to see how it became the rage of New York. Its bumps and grinds make Bob Fosse's choreography seem appropriate for nuns, and you've never seen so many lithe tongues in your life.
Call me old-fashioned, I liked it better when it had a soul. I liked it better when it made me care.
Cabaret is, of course, a musical telling of the wild days and wilder nights in 1930 Berlin, half-mad on the eve of the Nazi takeover. Cliff Bradshaw (Jay Goede) is the novel-writing innocent who has been traveling through Europe looking for inspiration.
He finds it in Sally Bowles (Joely Fisher), in the denizens of the sordid Kit Kat Klub and the personal dramas at Fraulein Schneider's rooming house. No one is willing to see the world falling apart around them.
Sam Mendes, the director whose startling clinical view of America's dysfunctional suburbs is pure artistry in the film American Beauty, is masterfully theatrical and equally analytic as he re-envisions Cabaret.
He removes any sense of romance (not to be confused with sex) between bisexual Cliff and Sally, and even excises all romance from their characters. These choices are doubtless accurate to author Christopher Isherwood's adventures, but no one ever said that a lot of fact was good for fiction.
Amoral Sally, who works so hard at being “mysterious and fascinating,” is merely exhausting in the person of Ms. Fisher. She has a nice set of pipes and delivers a slam-bang version of the title song.
Mr. Mendes pumps up the role of the Kit Kat Klub's devilish emcee (Jon Peterson). He is ever-present, overseeing all the action. His musical numbers are delicious, but his dialogue was hard to understand beyond the first few rows.
But as the emcee takes center stage, we lose anything worth caring about — Sally and Cliff and the wrenching romance between the middle-aged spinster landlady and her endearing Jewish tenant. The ending is a bone-chiller.
Cabaret, through March 5, Aronoff Center, 241-7469.
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