Cabaret
Coronado Playhouse did it in 2019. Cygnet Theatre did it in 2022. Wildsong put it on at OB Playhouse this summer. Now the Globe wades in and weighs in, and…well, it’s what you might expect. It’s big and it’s beautiful — those Art Deco balconies! — and it displays a sure hand with its innovations (weren’t there always Kit Kat Boys to go with the Kit Kat Girls?), adding in an element of race (Sally Bowles is black here) without ever obscuring the extant tensions.
Speaking of those tensions: Artistic Director Barry Edelstein’s program note explains that for the show’s original director Harold Prince, the “Kit Kat Club is its key conceptual innovation. The musical numbers performed there...are the backbone of the show, and they add surprising balance and resonance to the more conventional romance narratives that drive the story.” They also involve — dare we say implicate? — the audience, which is here to see both those romance narratives and those wild musical numbers, but just might be taken more with the latter, just might fall under the Emcee’s spell as he purrs that “in here, life is beautiful.” I mean, they came to the Old Globe, didn’t they? A lovely place away from the workaday world and its upheaval and dread, with stunning sets dazzling dances, and hey now, a few tables down in front, just to hammer home the point. The setting is Germany in the ‘30s. You know what’s coming. And yet here you are, and how you laugh. When Sally Bowles belts out the chorus, “Life is a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret,” and then fills in verses about her fellow chanteuse Elsie in Chelsea, who died of drink and disease while polite society tut-tutted its disapproval, well…there’s a reason theaters keep staging this one, and it ain’t just because a bunch of people think Trump’s a fascist. It’s more personal than that. Special mention should be given to Lincoln Clauss’s silken, sly, but maybe slightly needy Emcee, who runs the show even as the world runs him, and who manages to evoke past iterations without simply imitating them..
When
Ongoing until Sunday, October 15, 2023
Hours
| Sundays, 2pm |
| Fridays, 7:30pm |
| Saturdays, 7:30pm |