Sally forth

The personal politics of Cabaret

by Bill Rodriguez

CABARET. Book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb. Directed by Sam Mendes. Co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall. With Andrea McArdle, Jon Peterson, Hank Stratton, and Drew McVety. At Providence Performing Arts Center through February 11.

Set in pre-war Berlin, the edgy Kander & Ebb musical Cabaret is the sort of period piece my clone won't be surprised to see touring in a holographic production this time next century. For a slick bit of Broadway entertainment, it makes a timeless human and political point. And this version by Sam Mendes stresses the grim lesson even more than the 1966 original.

It's 1929, Hitler is only three years away from establishing his Third Reich, and the capital of a Germany still punch-drunk from war is a center of care-free decadence. Clifford Bradshaw (Hank Stratton) is an apple-cheeked American aspiring to be a novelist. He isn't in the city three hours before a showgirl and free-spirited Brit, Sally Bowles (Andrea McArdle), moves into his flat. When we meet her, she is the featured chanteuse at the Kit Kat Klub, where the leering Emcee (Jon Peterson) and his Kit Kat Girls make their fun-hearted case for Sodom and Gomorrah.

In packing in all its memorable, scene-capturing songs, the musical is a rather hasty abridgment of the original tale, which unfolded leisurely in Christopher Isherwood's short-story collection Goodbye to Berlin. Compared to the staged adaptations, the movie version, with Liza Minnelli and Michael York, better clarified the tensions tugging at and dooming the relationship between Sally and Cliff, especially the homosexual leanings throwing him off balance.

More accurately, Cliff is flat-out bisexual, as an early passionate kiss demonstrates. As on Broadway, this non-Equity production was directed by Sam Mendes, based on his 1993 London revival. Despite his deserved accolades for directing American Beauty, Mendes has his heart in the theater and his risk-taking shows. This is a surprisingly, and bravely, sexualized staging for a touring show that needs to pull in audiences from the hesitant heartland. More genitally oriented than a first-year psychiatry student, this production isn't big on gauzy veils. For example, in the ménage à trois number, "Two Ladies," while the film had the Emcee and two Fraüleins cavort under a bulging blanket, this rendition has them sport as pornographic shadow puppets. Mendes underscores the doomed attitude the Emcee represents by having him wander in and out of other scenes, like a ghost of the future. Peterson plays loose and smug in this chilling role, for which Joel Grey struck the canny template.

Oh, those song and dance numbers. (Bob Fosse's original choreography is gone, replaced by co-director Rob Marshall's simplified strutting and posing.) The songs with shower-humming staying power, such as the blithe "Willkommen" and the whimsical "Money," do this little gotcha!: They divert us and entertain, as well as echo the story's theme about entertainment diverting us from life at large.

The musical is skillfully constructed so that the political subtext can develop in a quiet little secondary plot line without boring us. We keep dipping into the December romance of the landlady Fraülein Schneider (Alma Cuervo) and her fruit merchant beau Herr Schultz (Hal Robinson). In these well-acted scenes and duets, Schultz keeps dismissing the storm clouds on the horizon as nothing the Jews haven't seen, and survived, before. Another character crucial to the development is Ernst Ludwig (Drew McVety), a fun-loving, good German who befriends Cliff and helps him out.

But with morbid fascination, our attention keeps returning to Sally and Cliff. Stratton is good in his less-demanding role, and while McArdle certainly isn't bad, she has more of a challenge in her role, which she doesn't take on. While the original orphan in Annie is fine in boppy ensemble numbers like "Don't Tell Mama" and "Mein Herr," she is oddly static, hands glued to mike stand, in a number here and there that demands showmanship. In "Maybe This Time," for example, while sheer charisma might rivet us to the slow tempo, McArdle doesn't have the presence to pull it off. She never musters the intensity, the infectious madness, the quality that would convince us that a guys' guy like Cliff could shake off his sexual orientation under her compelling magnetism. (She does get there in her desperate, vulnerable final rendition of "Cabaret," so she can pull it off.)

This is a stark and grounded version of Cabaret, a morality-play musical that nevertheless can easily drift into the sort of flighty mindlessness that it warns against.

It's a hard lesson to learn, and relearn, on both the personal and the social scale. When you treat life as a cabaret and nothing more, be prepared to be walloped by the bill at the end. Obliviousness comes at a cost.