Playhouse Theatre | ★★★★✩

Eddie Redmayne’s red-headed Emcee rising through a beam of spotlight like a grimacing, grotesque mannequin, and Jessie Buckley’s lost Sally Bowles, flaying through the title song like a doomed thrush. Of the many astounding moments conjured by director Rebecca Frecknall’s revival of Kander and Ebb’s musical, these two are tattooed on the memory.
This is a Cabaret that breaks the mould. Or at least the mould made by Bob Fosse’s 1972 film which inevitably takes pride of place in the public consciousness. In that multiple Oscar-winning triumph Liza Minelli’s prototype of Sally Bowles could not help but be better at singing and dancing than the description of her in Christoper Isherwood’s Berlin stories, the source material for the musical and, via John van Druten’s play, Joe Masteroff’s book. She has little or no talent, says Isherwood.
That was always a paradox. That a dive like the Kit Kat Club could ever host musical theatre performances that were obviously the best in Berlin or any town always demanded a certain suspension of disbelief. So Buckley’s Bowles is spot on, her singing true yet unlovely enough to convey that she has nowhere else but the Kit Kat to go. Even when Omari Douglas’s sensual, struggling American author Clifford offers the pregnant Sally sanctuary , her Sloane accent is proof she could never settle for his home town in Pennsylvania.
So that credibility gap between place and performance is closed by Frecknell’s production. Under Julia Cheng’s choreography the dancers here are less chorus line than mock-harem. Their costumes — designer Tom Scutt — hint at romantic, art-deco notions of biblical slavery, or would but for the stockings and suspenders. It all works well though I miss the drilled snap of Fosse’s moves.
Yet the triumph of Scutt’s design is architectural. The theatre’s inner core has been converted into an intimate in-the-round space. Yet before the audience reaches it the transgressive tone is set as they enter through, like all the best places offering illicit pleasure, an anonymous side entrance. Thereafter bars ply them with schnapps and other libations while floor shows of over-rouged performers writhe to music.
In truth it is not the most Weimar of vibes. But with the air filled with Covid anxiety if not the virus itself (punters are asked to show a negative test before entering) this production links the societal chaos of pre-war Berlin with today’s, and it’s all the more unsettling for that.
In the show’s programme Kander, the last surviving creator of this classic, reveals that had the show been produced ten years after its 1966 premiere they might have set it entirely in the Kit Kat Club. This is fascinating but where would its heart be? Here it is beautifully embodied outside the club by Elliot Levey as Jewish grocer Herr Shultz whose proposed marriage to Liza Sadovy’s landlady Fraulein Schneider is snuffed out by Stewart Clarke’s terrifyingly charming Nazi.
Meanwhile, Redmayne is a marvel. His Emcee — a slightly different species from the rest of the humans — is quite the most mercurial animal I have seen on stage. He moves in controlled convulsions and sings with a growl that rises to a vibrato flute, like parody of light opera.
More than anyone here he will survive the coming tyranny. Whereas the previous landmark Emcee performed by Alan Cumming in Sam Mendes’s 1993 production ended the show bearing the yellow star and pink triangle worn by condemned Jews and gays, Redmayne’s is suited and booted to join the new world order. And as the telescoping, revolving stage elevates him into that spotlight, below trudge the doomed victims led by Levey’s sweet, poor though no longer deluded Jew.