Review: Cabaret Returns to Broadway in an Incoherent Revival

There’s never been a better time to produce Cabaret on Broadway. This musical adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Joe Masteroff after the play by John Van Druten) is all about divine decadence before the fall — a theme that feels a lot closer to 2024 than it did 2014, 1998, 1987, or 1966. This is a story that speaks to now, and I really wish I could hear it clearly over the hideous shouting of auteur Rebecca Frecknall’s grotesque production at the August Wilson Theatre, where it arrives on a wave of acclaim from across the pond (the West End run is ongoing).

The plot remains, though it rolls out with minimal care and shallow directorial insight: Young American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood) arrives in Weimar-era Berlin and takes a room with the weary Fraulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth) before making his way to the Kit Kat Club, a seedy nightspot presided over by a sinister Emcee (Eddie Redmayne). He meets English chanteuse Sally Bowles (Gayle Rankin), and it’s just her luck, because the club owner (Loren Lester) with whom she has been shacking up has fired her and sent her packing. She invites herself to live with Cliff and he offers little resistance, knowing that she’ll be a reliable beard who will provide him with outrageous stories. They’re a hot mess — very much like this production.

That wasn’t obvious to me for the first hour I spent at the Wilson, which has been rechristened the Kit Kat Club for this semi-immersive experience. The producers are inviting ticketholders into the theater a full 75 minutes before curtain — unheard of on Broadway and a welcome change of pace from the typical binge-purge way New York theaters treat audiences. We enter at the side, winding through narrow alleys and hallways as if we’re entering a speakeasy. The entire theater has been renovated to accommodate multiple warren-like bars, where flirty members of the prologue cast entertain patrons as we imbibe. This pre-show diversion, directed by Jordan Fein, is weird and wonderful.

The house has been similarly retrofitted to accommodate the audience on all sides of a small central stage, with cabaret tables closest to the stage and the orchestra positioned in two mezzanines (gorgeous and practical design by Tom Scutt). All of it primes the audience for an extraordinary night at the theater. And then Eddie Redmayne shows up.

Redmayne’s Emcee is a fantastic beast, minus the fantastic. He contorts his face, twists his fingers, and hunches his back like he’s about to ring the bell in the Marienkirche. A sweaty, twitchy animatronic, he makes Alan Cumming look subtle. Where previous Emcees seduced you into the party’s darkroom before punching you in the gut, Redmayne comes out swinging. He’s someone you would encounter once and spend the rest of your life actively avoiding.

Scutt outfits Redmayne in a variety of high-concept costumes, including a pearly queen Wehrmacht getup and a Pagliacci clown suit. Sometimes he dons a blond wig and croons like he’s Kermit the Frog headlining at Nuremberg. Frecknall seems to want the Emcee to represent the soul of Germany, which is a fair enough choice; but she has little to say about why people like Cliff and Sally were attracted to that soul in the first place.

Rankin’s desperate Sally offers a half-answer. Her lackluster “Don’t Tell Mama” and spiteful “Mein Herr” show us that Sally isn’t a great vocal talent, although her “Maybe This Time,” which takes place entirely in Sally’s head, proves that Rankin is. It’s amazing that any club wants Sally at all! Still, I couldn’t square her defiant decision to stay in Berlin with her distressed interpretation of the title song. Perhaps, like a heroin addict well aware that there’s Fentanyl everywhere, she just can’t help going back for another hit of Berlin.

It’s certainly more than the elusive Blankson-Wood offers as Cliff. From the moment he encounters the smuggler Ernst Ludwig (an unremarkable Henry Gottfried) on the train to the final scene when he rides that train right back to Paris, Cliff’s motivations remain shrouded. He’s not so much a camera as a captive in his own story.

It’s strange because, as Schneider reminds him, he can always leave. She can’t. Neuwirth’s lucid and powerful performance offers one of the few silver linings of this production. Her interpretation of “What Would You Do?” is the best I’ve ever heard (it should be noted that the band, led by Jennifer Whyte, sounds great throughout). We truly believe that Schneider loves the Jewish fruit seller, Herr Schultz (Steven Skybell). But love doesn’t win in Cabaret. Fear does.

Skybell’s performance is the other highlight of this revival. His manners and diction are so precise, it’s like he stepped out of a time machine. And it tells a vital story: Even as Herr Schultz insists he is just another German, his accent (a hint of zaide) and lively hand gestures betray his difference — and the neighborhood fascists have noticed.

“School children. Young — full of mischief,” he emphatically explains away the brick thrown through his window. It’s a sentiment surely echoing through the halls of our most august institutions as university administrators attempt to dismiss the return of public antisemitism in our own time. Sadly, Frecknall mostly misses such textual opportunities in her obsessive focus on aesthetics.

Scutt’s small circular set provides the foundation for everything, with its rotating platforms that rise into a mechanical wedding cake. Julia Cheng’s jerky, aggressively sexual (but never sexy) choreography turns the ensemble into possessed figurines in a music box from hell. Isabella Byrd’s saturated lighting hits their heavy make-up (by Guy Common) to make everyone look ghoulish. Scutt’s fishnets and corsets eventually give way to gray Aryan chic as the cast rotates around the central platform, cogs in a machine, fated to relive this horror eight performances a week.

It’s true that Kander, Ebb, and Masteroff borrowed from Brecht to tell a story set in the Berlin he would have known. But Frecknall has gone all-in, telegraphing the ending from the very beginning yet never convincingly showing us how we get there. Only Fraulein Kost (Natascia Diaz, elegantly walking the line between comic relief and vicious antagonist) lets us glimpse the resentment that is the jet fuel of reactionary politics. But for most of Frecknall’s production, we are left to believe that Naziism is akin to a natural disaster.

The result is a superficial fairytale of a Berlin overrun with hooker clowns and cartoon Nazis, something that bears little resemblance to the insidious creep of authoritarianism in our own world. It can’t happen here, this production seems to reassure its well-heeled audience. And it really feels as though we are all fast asleep.