Cabaret

No one wants to see the prairie-set musical Oklahoma! staged in a barn. Nor would it be appealing, even as a nod to irony, to attend the junkyard-set Cats at a city dump. But to see Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret—an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s short stories about Weimar-era doomed lovers set against the raunchy bistro nightlife of the period—in an actual cabaret is another matter. Cabaret is a property that often gets tricked-out to its detriment; God forbid anything less than a neopunk S&M hootenanny be trotted out to illustrate the swinelike decadence of a society anesthetized to its own ills. Yet Anzevino’s snug, concept-free revival of limited means—crudely lit, amateurish in its theatrics, utterly sincere in its performances (even when they’re underequipped)—is, in its way, as authentic a Cabaret as can be achieved.

With fresh, simple takes on iconic musical numbers and three principal performers who know how to calibrate their talents not just to the fabulously dank little No Exit Café but also to larger-than-life material that would otherwise defy the space, Anzevino has a production that’s more than just atmosphere. (Though, damn, with the No Exit he could skid on atmosphere alone.) He has Trager, who never overplays his natural diabolical pungency as the emcee; Tretta, who steps forward as an actor while never showing off too much vocally as shallow coquette Sally Bowles; and Brothers, who might be Chicago’s Lotte Lenya, in the landlady role Lenya originally created. The rest of the leads are adequate, but the five-person chorus is so good you’ll feel guilty afterward: They turn out to be Nazis after all.