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Cabaret
John Van Druten took the title of his play I Am a Camera, based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, from Isherwood’s line “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” Van Druten’s play is the basis for Cabaret, and his title informs the portrayal of Cliff Bradshaw, the musical’s Isherwood stand-in: a sideline observer taking in the indulgences of 1929 Berlin followed by the alarming ascent of the Nazi party. He’s the lens through which we see Sally Bowles and the decadent Kit Kat Klub.
Corti’s production sets out to make Cabaret Cliff’s story, placing the character front and center and reinstating two rarely heard songs for him (one original, one written two decades later). Kit Kat girls and boys slink in to watch along with Cliff, silently reinforcing his outsider’s gaze, and Weitzer gets to throw off a lot more charm than most in his role. But Cliff is still a largely passive character, and keeping the spotlight on him makes his passivity curiously contagious. The forces driving the main players grow hazy, from Mahler’s too-indifferent Sally to the neutered interactions between Finnegan and David Lively as Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz (excepting Finnegan’s tour-de-force rendition of “What Would You Do?”).
Still, this is one of the best musical-theater scores ever written, and the cast and eight-piece orchestra do it justice. Corti’s choreography is well executed, if a bit overly familiar. And Andrews is a delightfully puckish Emcee, giving his character a showman’s twinkle that we imagine Joel Grey could admire. If only the book scenes showed the same spark.
