| Seeing CABARET having seen the original and the film | |
| Last Edit: lordofspeech 07:28 pm EDT 07/24/24 | |
| Posted by: lordofspeech 07:13 pm EDT 07/24/24 | |
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| Warning: THIS REVIEW IS HYPER-CRITICAL WITH MANY SPOILERS: Cabaret was heavy-handed and yet not thought through. Both Cliff and Sally (an understudy) were African-American. Didn’t the Nazis discriminate against darker skinned peoples? No mention was made so it was a disconnect for me from the reality of what I was looking at. The woman who played Sally (an understudy) had no charm, no guile, no frisson, so her ultimate decision to turn to denial was not heart-breaking. At all. And the focus around the event of her feelings about the abortion was very sloppy and off-hand. (It was a reminder of how excellent Minnelli’s work was, and not just in her technical delivery of the songs.) Eddie Redmayne delivered a variety of star-turns as the Emcee with his pretty face, with elaborate costumes. He was a Ziegfeld Follies all in himself, but he too was heavy-handed in his irony, and his disregard for evil was not so chilling as had been Joel Grey’s. The theatre had been renovated to the tune of 21 million dollars so they could do this ‘immersive’ in-the-round version. The immersive idea, as an srchitectural feat, did nothing to create anything truly intimate. And the text itself, having been through multiple stage versions and the film one, wasn’t focussed in its effect. The back and forth about Cliff’s/Chris’ sexuality only helps to undermine the very real love we need to see between Sally and him. (Another reason to give back the song WHY SHOULD I WAKE UP. We need to get inside our protagonist, Chris/Cliff.) Besides, our current world-context, with concerns swirling about the Jewish people’s morality in their state, complicated the automatic sympathies we’re meant to feel about Jewish Germans and complicit Germans, in this story’s past. Again, a disconnect from the intent of the original piece and now. Same with the hyper-sexualizing of the KitKat Club. What was the point? To criticize the freedoms of the Weimar republic? Was there an implication that sexual excesses lead to fascism? I hope not. Harold Prince, who directed the original production and created the Joel Grey character to remind us how complicit we all are in terrorist states, had known what he was doing with his version in that time. And so too, Fosse in the film with Liza. Plus, technically, there wasn’t much great singing, the various accents (American, British, German, etc.) were all over the place, and the ensemble of the KitKat Club wasn’t sexy or seductive. They were beyond crass and they weren’t costumed attractively, probably on purpose. One song had about ten different versions of choreographed anal sex, and not titillating, just in bad taste. Skybell and Newirth were fine, and their storyline of the romance between the non-Jewish landlady and the shy fruit merchant worked. But the no-furniture set (depriving the Schulz couple of soft sofas and endtables, and the Bowles couple of an actual, needed bed) didn’t really support a richness of 4th wall realism for this couple. I’m glad for this storyline, and Newirth and Skybell were very professional. Isn’t there a Krystallnacht in this? It seemed to be signalled by a fluttering of shards of white paper from the ‘sky.’ It wasn’t truly scarey or horrific. I miss the songs MEESKITE and WHY SHOULD I WAKE UP, and tgere is no need for MEIN HERR when we had DON’T TELL MAMA. (MEIN HERR WAS ‘done’ by Fosse and Liza; this one was a dud.) The audience howled and screeched its approval, when signals were sent. |
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