Reviews 2008
Reviews 2008
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music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Joe Masteroff, directed by Amanda Dehnert
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
May 29-October 25, 2008
"We have no troubles here”... Well, Maybe a Few
Like “The Music Man” the Stratford Festival’s second musical of 2008 is also revisits a work previously mounted at the Festival Theatre. The 1987 season at Stratford saw Brian Macdonald’s production of “Cabaret”. Now we have new production by Amanda Dehnert, a resident director at the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. The original production alternated scenes situated in the outside world with those inside the cabaret that provided sly comment on action outside. Yet, anyone staging “Cabaret” has two powerful visions of the work to contend with. The first, of course, is the famous 1972 film by Bob Fosse that did away entirely with the Fräulein Schneider/Herr Schultz subplot and kept only the songs from the musical actually sung in the cabaret. He tended to glamourize the cabaret itself and presented the Emcee as an asexual, almost mechanical figure. The second vision is Sam Mendes’ radical reconception of the musical in 1993 that intentionally deglamourized the cabaret setting and presented the Emcee as a raunchy participant in the skits. In his now well-known finale we see the Emcee and all the cabaret performers and habitués in concentration camp uniforms.
Dehnert tries to put her own stamp on the production and is only partially successful. Her idea is to set all of the action, including the “real world” scenes, inside the cabaret. These appear as skits that the cabaret is staging with cabaret characters viewing and often intruding into them. This reconception confounds the question of reality and illusion in the musical even more. Confounding the situation further is that the “cabaret” of Douglas Paraschuk’s highly effective set looks more like a bombed out subway station stained with grime and ventilated with broken windows. Tracks making a semicircular curve in front of the set are used to roll on platforms representing dressing rooms and other locations. The show is a memory play, the recollections of the American writer Clifford Bradshaw of his time in Berlin, but in this production with the Emcee as the prime observer on scenes he is not acting, Dehnert seems refocus the show as the Emcee’s memories of the past.
This vision of the musical would be enough to set Dehnert’s apart from the others, but she doesn’t stop there. The show begins with the Emcee and some other cabaret actors playing the opening overture on their own instruments. “Is she going to use John Doyle’s groundbreaking idea for his ‘Sweeney Todd’ for the whole show?” we wonder. Fortunately, she doesn’t. Then at the end of the first number of the second act she has the cast clad in pyjamas, only to turn around at the end to show they have been marked with an “X” and to be sent to concentration camps, an obvious reference to Mendes’ version. If that weren’t enough she decides to use film and video projections on a beaded curtain. Sometimes there is merely a projection on the curtain of a landing Fräulein Schneider’s rooming house. Sometimes there are films alluding to silent movies, making the Emcee into a kind of Fatty Arbuckle of Germany, but the video projections are often of the musical and dance numbers in progress, like “Mein Herr”. These are so intrusive you can’t wait until the beaded curtain rises and Dehnert allows you to see what’s happening on stage yourself.
What makes this production work is not Dehnert’s vision but the powerful performances she draws from the entire cast. Trish Lindström plays Sally Bowles as if she were hopped up on drugs. This Sally displays an almost scary diffuse manic nature that only seems to find focus when she is performing. It is a daring and original performance that removes all sentiment from the character. Lindström gives riveting renditions of the songs. She makes “Don’t Tell Mama” very funny and “Cabaret” electrifying since Sally, who has just dumped Clifford, seems to realize the magnitude of her mistake and tries to overcome the feeling while she is singing. As Clifford Bradshaw, Sean Arbuckle gives one of his best performances ever. It is not an easy to appear to both ordinary and engaging with a quiet nature that conceals bisexual passion. Arbuckle accomplishes this with ease. In fact, he is the best Cliff I have ever seen because he is at once so natural and yet suggests the hidden depths that make him attractive. He also has a lovely voice.
Because Dehnert desentimentalizes the Sally-Clifford relationship, it is really the subplot involving Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz that grabs us. Nora McLellan is absolutely superb as Fräulein Schneider. Her delivery of such songs as “So What?” and “What Would You Do?” are so impassioned they sweep you up into the character’s dilemma of choosing between love and survival. For his part Frank Moore is a very sympathetic Herr Schultz, an optimistic and caring man in a time that contradicts those values. His duets with McLellan like “It Couldn’t Please Me More” and “Married” become the real heart of the show.
Bruce Dow’s Emcee may look like and overgrown cherub with a mini-mohawk, but he is definitely in the line of Mendes’ pansexual Emcee. Outrageous, vulgar, unrestrained, he makes Joel Grey’s interpretation in the film look straight-laced by comparison. His two best moments are in the songs “Two Ladies” which he hilariously acts out by himself, for too short a time, with two small rag dolls and the song “I Don’t Care Much”, where we finally get to hear the real strength of his voice and feel the character’s underlying bitterness. Cory O’Brien, who happened to play the Nazi convert Rolf in “The Sound of Music” in 2001, is excellent as the Nazi part member Ernst Ludwig. The key in both musicals is to make the character dashing and attractive, so that the revelation later will be all the more painful, but while Rolf still has some kindness in him, Ernst does not and it is chilling to see someone who seemed so convivial given to sudden brutality. The same is true of Diana Coatsworth, as Fräulein Kost, who entertains lots of visiting sailors in her room. Coatsworth makes her an amusing, unashamedly brazen character, but when Fräulein Kost sides with the Nazis against her landlady Fräulein Schneider our smile vanishes. Dehnert adds a further twist to the plot by casting Monique Lund as the cabaret owner Max. Those familiar with the story will remember that Sally’s break-up with Max leads to her being fired from the club. Dehnert has obviously decided Sally will be as bisexual as Clifford. Lund does carry the role off though she looks more dapper than menacing in a tux. Andrew Moyes leads off the seemingly innocent song about the Nazi’s destiny, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, in a lovely, clear tenor, all the more effective for sounding so beautiful and pure.
David Boechler fittingly clothes the non-cabaret characters are unglamorous period costumes, with Ernst obviously wealthier than the rest and Sally more eccentric. The cabaret characters, however, are a mishmash of all kinds of styles from circus to modern urban musicals and clash rather than work together to create an atmosphere. Lighting designer Kevin Fraser is given ample opportunity to use expressionist effects that fit in well with the period and Dehnert’s silent movie references. Rick Fox’s taut conducting brings out the score Weill-like acerbity.
If you have to decide between the two musicals on offer at Stratford this year, “The Music Man” is fine if all you want is pleasant musical fluff. For more riveting performances, you should choose “Cabaret”, even if these are embedded in an over-conceptualized production and even if the production doesn’t flow seamlessly from scene to scene. Dow, Lindström, Arbuckle, Moore and especially McLellen invest so much emotion and skill in their work they really should not be missed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Bruce Dow (centre) with chorus of Cabaret. ©David Hou.
2008-06-16
Cabaret