Cast of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Photo by Marc Brenner.That's probably because Rebecca Frecknall's production is part-musical, part-theatrical experience. Descending from the street into the bar, you receive a complimentary drink and semi-immersive pre-show entertainment. When the show starts, those willing to part with £250 for front row seats have the opportunity to be sat on by Jessie Buckley or have Eddie Redmayne steal their cocktail. During the interval, a couple of lucky/unfortunate (delete as applicable) souls are picked out of the audience to dance onstage with the Kit Kat boys. It's all good fun and adds to the idea that you're not just watching Cabaret, you're At An Event. With all this secrecy and pre-amble, the re-brand of the theatre, the casting of Redmayne and Buckley, the price of tickets, the rave reviews and now the eleven Olivier nominations, Frecknall's Cabaret has a lot to live up to.
Cast of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Photo by Marc Brenner.
Buckley brings an brilliantly uncute bite to Sally Bowles. Sally is often portrayed onstage a petulant and brittle "manic pixie dreamgirl", but in Buckley's hands she's deluded, manipulative, and often dislikeable. It's an original and intriguing take on the character, and makes Bowles' perpetual gin-swigging more disturbing. I've seen a few different Cabarets, and Buckley's Bowles is the first who is as convincing in her scenes set in the world outside the Club as she is belting out showstoppers inside it. It's also the first time an actress has made me seriously consider what Sally's backstory is (not counting the Kit Kat-ified version she recounts in her earworm opening song, Don't Tell Mama). Buckley's performance is a fresh take on Sally Bowles, while also seeming to be everything the character was truly intended to be in Joe Masteroff's book. Vocally, she's outstanding, and her version of the title number brings irony, mimicry and desperation to it. The song's been sung a thousand times by a thousand actresses, yet Buckley's version strips it of any cliche and gave me a new understanding of what the character means by "I love a cabaret". If she doesn't win the Best Actress Olivier, I'll sell my own fur coat.
Animated, elfin and androgynous, for years Redmayne has seemed perfect casting for Cabaret's Emcee. Finally starring in the role, Redmayne begins the show snaking and crawling around the stage in over-sized knickerbockers and a paper party hat. He ends it...well, there have been many different stagings of the final moments of Cabaret, and Frecknall's choice was one I hadn't seen done before. Between these first and last moments, Redmayne pops in and out of the onstage action, up and down the Club's balconies, and to and from the stage's central trapdoor. He wears and removes a range of wigs, facepaint and costumes, designed by Tom Scutt. The skeleton-made-of-pearls costume the Emcee appears in towards the end of the first act was especially creepy. At times, Redmayne's performance gets lost in all this regalia and the busyness of the production. He's great fun when introducing Sally onstage (the word, "Booooooowles" stretching out for at least fifteen seconds each time), but doesn't embrace the Kit Kat Club's debauchery. I wasn't fully convinced by his Emcee's interactions with the Kat Kat Club girls, though his dance with a gorilla in If You Could See Her had a genuine tenderness to it. Redmayne brings plenty of humour and eeriness to the role, and he does a great job with the songs, particularly those in the lower register.
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Photo by Marc Brenner.
In the scenes set onstage at the Club, Redmayne and Buckley are supported by a gaggle of Kit Kat boys and girls, who dance terrifically (particularly whoever was inside that gorilla costume). They all look like they're having a blast, especially when wandering into the audience. The story going on outside the nightclub setting concerns two doomed romances: Sally's affair with Cliff Bradshaw, a writer based on Christopher Isherwood (Cabaret is adapted from the play I Am A Camera, based on Isherwood's Berlin Stories), and the gentle romance between Cliff's landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and the Jewish shopkeeper, Herr Shultz. It's the early 1930s, and all four characters are determinedly ignoring burgeoning Nazi fervour, until it forces its way to the forefront. Omari Douglas is a delightful stage presence who gives a thoughtful portrayal of Cliff. Gender and sexual fluidity abound gloriously at the Kit Kat Club, and this is contrasted by the muted ambiguity which Douglas brings to Cliff's possible queerness. After this strong performance, his appearance in Channel 4's It's A Sin and his Olivier nom for Constellations, surely this has got to be the last time Douglas will be playing anything less than a starring role.
Liza Sadovy and Elliot Levey are Olivier nominees too, for their portrayals of Schneider and Shultz. These retirement-age lovers swoon at each other over a pineapple until their relationship is derailed by anti-Semitism. Sadovy is especially excellent, bringing both sweetness and steeliness to her depiction of a world-weary woman who has lived through multiple political upheavals, and whose quiet acceptance juxtaposes the dramatics of Sally, Cliff, and the goings-on at the Club. Anna-Jane Casey plays Fraulein Kost, another of Schneider's tenants, and steals scenes with her hilarious ruses to conceal the array of "brothers and nephews" exiting her flat every morning.
Eddie Redmayne as Emcee in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Photo by Marc Brenner.
Cabaret is an experimental piece, and Frecknall attempts innovative approaches and interpretations. Not all of her ideas work, and the production suffers from over-directing. The Emcee's heart-rending ballad I Don't Care Much is tragic enough on its own, without the need for Sally to wander onstage in the middle of it, change outfit, and hurl herself into an embrace with the Emcee. There's an over-use of Scutt's costumes throughout the musical, making the points he and Frecknall are making through the use of costume design unclear. Still, in a 56-year-old musical which has had an Oscar-winning film adaptation, at least two huge West End and Broadway productions, and an index of stage and screen stars playing the leads, its admirable that Frecknall has searched for new ways to spin it. If you can get last-minute returns in the next few days you'll have the treat of watching Buckley, but this production doesn't need big names to be worth booking. I definitely recommend seeing Cabaret when the replacement cast take over from 21st March. Though the front-row, three-course-meals tickets are fair few marks/yens/bucks/pounds, don't be put off by rumours that this show is entirely unaffordable. The layout of the theatre means that the £30 seats don't feel like you're sitting in the Gods, and have a great view of the stage. Plus, from the Circle seats you can see the band. "Even the orchestra is beautiful" the Emcee promises at the beginning, and Jennifer Whyte's band beam throughout the three-hour run-time as they give their all to Kander and Ebb's iconic score.
While Cabaret has always been an intentionally uncomfortable musical, present world events make watching it in 2022 an upsetting and painful experience. "Still relevant" is an over-used phrase, but songs like What Would You Do? ("Grow old like me, with neither the will nor wish to run, who isn't at war with anyone") and the chilling Act 1 closer, Tomorrow Belongs To Me ("Oh Fatherland, Fatherland show us the sign/Your children have waited to see/The morning will come when the world is mine/Tomorrow belongs to me,") are now exactly that, in ways Frecknall couldn't have predicted. Even more excruciating is the Emcee's opening command of that we should leave our troubles outside, and Cliff's final realisation that he and Sally have both been "fast asleep". With the Playhouse Theatre set-up as the Kit Kat Club, the audience can't help but feel complicit in this avoidance. I didn't leave the Kit Kat Club as cheerful as the Emcee promised. Instead, I felt disconcerted, unsettled and challenged. And isn't that what theatre is really for?
Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. Photo by Marc Brenner.
When brothers Tobias and Steve learn that their mother was patient zero in a world now possessed of flesh-eating zombies, they are forced to patch their differences whilst caring for her and fending-off the seemingly endless onslaught from those outside wanting to get in.