Reviews 2014
Reviews 2014
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music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Joe Masteroff, directed by Peter Hinton
Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
May 10-October 26, 2014
Emcee: “I Don’t Care Much”
Peter Hinton, who directed such an insightful production of Lady Windermere’s Fan last year, has returned this year with a production of the classic musical Cabaret that is so overintellectualized it leaves you cold. Most directors are content to focus on the story of two foreigners falling into a relationship in Berlin on the eve of the Nazi election victory in Germany. Hinton has decided to make the musical also an examination of what it means to write an autobiographical novel. Theoretically, this is an intriguing question but as Hinton applies it to this musical it deadens the impact of all the numbers staged in the cabaret of the title. The show is filled with excellent performances, especially by Deborah Hay as Sally Bowles, but these performances often fight their way out from under Hinton’s concept.
The audience’s experience begins when it enters the Festival Theatre and sees what seems to be a metalwork sculpture of the Tower of Babel on stage. Michael Gianfrancesco’s set is actually two entwined spiral staircases that meet at a small platform at the top. The tower is on a revolves thus allowing Hinton to have actors climb the stairs on one side and descend on the other in a completely fluid motion. The double helix, the metalwork and the revolve also make the set remind one of Vladimir Tatlin’s famous constructivist Monument to the Third International (1920). The tower was meant to be the ultimate symbol of modernity but post-Revolutionary Russia was too bankrupt to build it. If the Tower of Babel is a symbol of pride that has to be struck down, Tatlin’s tower is a symbol of idealism that has become impractical in the real world – both work as images of pre-nazi Germany.
The set also embodies Hinton’s prime concept of the intertwining of reality and fiction in the musical. When the musical begins there are two figures on the set – Gray Powell as Clifford Bradshaw typing away and a mute figure invented by Hinton called “Klown” played by Ben Sanders. The Shaw is using Sam Mendes’s 1998 version that he created for the Donmar Warehouse which incorporates more of the source material, Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (1935 and 1939), into the text. The first line of the musical is now Clifford-as-Christopher’s first line of the 1939 stories, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”. The Klown represents a second observer who see all that Clifford sees but from the other perspective. He represents the Berlin that Clifford is observing and when Clifford leaves at the end the Klown, in heavy-handed symbolism, commits suicide.
What is clear is that Hinton does not really believe Clifford’s “I am a camera” statement. The entire point of his approach is that Clifford is constantly being influenced by what he observes and thus cannot be merely “passive, recording, not thinking”. Usually, in productions of Cabaret, we are meant to see the relation between the acts taking place on the stage of the seedy Kit Kat Klub and the actions taking place in real life backstage, on trains or at Frau Schneider’s rooming house where Clifford lives. The cabaret song “Two Ladies” comes right after we realize that the previously gay Clifford is open to a heterosexual relationship.
Hinton, however, has decided that all the action of the musical is part of a cabaret act. On the one hand, Berlin cabarets, then and now, were never like the one that Kander and Ebb portray. They primarily feature sketches with reference to the political themes of the moment. By including the scenes with Frau Schneider (Corinne Koslo), Herr Schultz (Benedict Campbell), Fräulein Kost (Jenny L. Wright) and her sailor “nephews” and the smuggler Ernst Ludwig (Jay Turvey), Hinton is making the Kit Kat Klub much more like a real cabaret of the time. To emphasize that all the life we see on stage really is a “cabaret” (as the song says), Hinton even has music director Paul Sportelli incorporate amplified sounds of typing and typewriter bells into the percussion of the score.
At first glance Hinton’s approach seems extremely clever. Anyone who has heard of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1927) will know that the very presence of an observer affects the phenomena that he is observing. Anyone who has skimmed through postmodernist theories of historiography, like Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), will be able to tell you that as soon as an historian begins to write a history, that history, no matter how “true” it is, will begin to take on plots and ideologies familiar from fiction. Thus, to portray everything we see on stage as proceeding from Clifford’s imagination makes sense. In fact, when Clifford arrives in Berlin, all the other characters enter the stage from his opened suitcase.
At the same time intimate moments between the non-cabaret characters become cabaret acts. Thus when Herr Schultz and Frau Schneider sing about the pineapple that Her Schultz has given her, the entire chorus arrange themselves on the winding stairs and raise silver pineapples in accordance with the music.
More usually in productions of Cabaret, the counterpoise to Clifford, the moral foreigner, is the Emcee, the amoral Berliner. Hinton has made his forever moping Klown take the Emcee’s place in the structure in order to underscore rather too heavily that the Emcee is merely Clifford’s puppet or mouthpiece. To this end Hinton directs Chioran as if her were a jumping-jack toy (or Hampelmann), his invisible string being pulled by Clifford. Thus the Emcee, in an angular black costume with Pierrot makeup, makes jerky, mechanical movements throughout the show and seems devoid of personality. This is a major loss for the show and must be frustrating for actor Juan Chioran. The Emcee usually injects fun into the show. Here he is deliberately mechanical. The one song that gives insight into his personality, “I Don’t Care Much”, can be sung full of irony to reveal the Emcee’s fear about how Germany is changing. Under Hinton, the song seems to sum up the world view of a performer who don’t care much about anything including Sally or his show.
At the end Hinton has Clifford begin to sing the final reprise of “Willkommen” only to segue to lipsyching to the Emcee singing the same song. Hinton wants to show how the creator (Clifford) of the story and his creation (Emcee) have changed places, but has outsmarted himself in the process.
Corinne Koslo and Benedict Campbell give wonderfully warm performances, musically and dramatically, as the two respectable middle-aged lovers Frau Schneider and Her Schultz. Without them the production would be unbearably chilly. Jenny L. Wright catches the precise mix of comedy and malice in the mendacious lodger Fräulein Kost, while Jay Turvey as Ernst shows how charming and friendly a Nazi party member can be to someone like Cliff, whom he thinks will be sympathetic.
Grey Powell’s performance of Cliff is problematic. When Powell played Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 2011, he was excellent as man eating away inside by his inability to acknowledge his homosexuality. In Cabaret, however, he is unconvincing as a gay man who is rather surprised to be having his first hetero affair. The main concern Powell gives Cliff is whether Frau Schneider will find out about him and Sally rather than his own bewilderment at what has happened. Yet, Powell does well convey Cliff’s general naïveté about the complexities of the alien world he has entered.
The depiction of the Emcee as shirtless and wearing suspenders has become such a cliché that it’s good costume designer Judith Bowden has come up with something completely different. Her costumes capture the poverty rampant in prewar Berlin and even her costumes for the Kit Kat Klub have a deliberately tatty look. Hinton and choreographer Denise Clarke make the acts in the Kit Kat Klub seem strangely tame compared to the raunchiness of Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s staging in their 1998 revival that has been remounted just this year.
We appreciate the fine work of the actors but remain generally unmoved. In promoting his concept over simply telling the story, Hinton keeps us at a distance and this is the result. Knowing how moving the members of this cast have been in other productions, it’s a pity that Hinton is so determined in preventing their performances from grabbing us by the throat as they could. Hinton thus robs the Shaw of the thrilling Cabaret it could have had.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Cast of Cabaret; Juan Chioran as the Emcee; Deborah Hay as Sally Bowles. ©2014 Emily Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.shawfest.com.
2014-07-27
Cabaret