Cabaret

Since the birth of the modern book musical roughly eight decades ago, the musical-theater form has proven largely resistant to the kind of directorial interpretation that’s common to straight plays. Oklahoma! tends to resemble its original 1943 production; Cats pretty much always looks like Cats. This is a field in which John Doyle’s Sondheim revivals with cast members playing the score are considered major innovation.

Cabaret is the exception that proves the rule. Beginning perhaps with Bob Fosse’s overhaul of the 1966 Broadway show for his 1972 film version, directors have assumed free rein with Masteroff, Kander and Ebb’s portrait of Weimar Germany, based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera (itself taken from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories). With all the extra material available—songs cut from the original run and new songs written for the film and for the first Broadway revival in 1987—none of the productions of Cabaret I’ve seen have used exactly the same book or score.

That would seem to make the show an ideal match for the merry revisionists of the Hypocrites, the company of subversives that’s retained its aura of punky upstart even after 13 years of punkily starting up. The Hypocrites have a reputation (deserved or not) for reinterpretations that emphasize—or introduce—the darkest aspects of their chosen material.

Cabaret, of course, was never exactly sunny, setting the rise of the Nazis against the fall of Berlin decadence, as embodied by the Kit Kat Klub and witnessed by American writer Clifford Bradshaw (a strong Peters). But that darkness isn’t always embraced; some versions of this show seem so eager to please that the Third Reich feels like a minor threat. While the Hypocrites’ production darkens the corners—showgirl Sally Bowles’s (Leopold, radiating willful naïveté) eye-opener isn’t the prairie oyster but a bump of coke—it only illuminates what’s present in the material.

Hawkins’s production is physically unadorned: Marianna Csaszar’s bare stage incorporates exposed brick and catwalks, while the Kit Kat girls and boys don Alison Siple’s artfully distressed underthings. But the director rearranges and embellishes Masteroff’s book to shed new light on familiar characters. He turns the song “Two Ladies,” the Emcee’s ode to ménages à trois, into a threesome for the Emcee, Sally and Cliff, illustrating Cliff’s seduction by Berlin’s blithe hedonism. (Yes, the Emcee here is female, played by the sly Fisher.)

This production goes further than I’ve ever seen in eliminating Cabaret’s supposed divide between the naturalistic Berlin scenes and the nightclub numbers that provide fanciful commentary. The Emcee steps into “Marriage” to facilitate romance between Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz; Cliff signals the orchestra for accompaniment when trying to persuade Sally not to leave him. When Sally feels a song coming on, musical director Mike Przygoda pops onstage, guitar at the ready. (Przygoda’s genius orchestrations, as likely to use acoustic guitar, mandolin and harmonium as piano and bass, make Kander and Ebb’s brilliant score, the Chicago and Kiss of the Spider Woman duo’s first Broadway success, sound brand-new.)

This embrace of theatricality underlines the dreamlike state of Cliff and Sally’s Berlin—which makes the wake-up call of their friend Ernst’s “politics,” brandished in the form of a gun, all the more jarring. McLean’s Ernst feels truly dangerous, as he should; he becomes the play’s sinister force, while Fisher’s Emcee is unusually sympathetic, cast as a resister of the encroaching fascism. Not all of Hawkins’s choices work: The role he invents for child actor Kyle Erkonen, suggesting a link to the Emcee’s gender switch, feels baldly manipulative. On the whole, though, his Cabaret makes a strong case for the worth of directorial revision.

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