Before the audience of Mask and Bauble’s spring musical, Cabaret, is ushered to its seats, it is afforded a brief glimpse into a dimly lit dressing room. The room, populated by ladies in bustiers and hotpants and men in lipstick, is just a tantalizing taste of the raucous, racy experience ahead. While not without its serious plot points, the show is worth seeing for the erotic musical numbers alone, which almost make the storyline incidental.
The show, set in 1930s Berlin, traces the Nazi party’s rise to power through the eyes of the patrons and performers of the seedy Kit Kat Klub. The action is reflected through the doomed romance of Sally Bowles (Olivia Bennett, COL ‘10), a vivacious British cabaret performer, and Clifford Bradshaw (Matt Lai, COL ‘11), an ineffectual American writer seeking inspiration overseas.The two negotiate their love story as the supporting characters dance and sing their way through the pain and sadness of life in the crumbling Weimar Republic.
Poulton Hall’s black box theater is transformed into a dark, smoky club complete with café-style seating in the first row. The audience members lucky enough to find themselves at these little tables can expect to be caressed by the Emcee (Tom Casserly COL ‘10) and his Kit Kat girls, who lead the action of the first act with a frenetic whirl of sexy dancing and slapstick physical comedy and help bring the show to its somber close by immaculately reflecting the dissolution of German society through their movement and song. Casserly could be slightly more pervy and flamboyant, but he does an incredible job holding the play’s fragments together with his musical interludes and erotic audience interaction.
Bennett’s performance is a tour de force. While it would’ve been easy to imitate Liza Minnelli’s flighty, slightly unhinged Sally Bowles in the film version of Cabaret, Bennett takes the character in a slightly more serious, aggressively sexual direction, and it works. It also helps that she and Lai were the only two cast members to escape the ambiguous German accents that the rest of the characters adopted. While the accents occasionally sounded convincing, they often got lost during songs, and many of the characters flitted in and out of them.
The show’s other low points have less to do with the cast’s failings and more to do with the plot itself. The romance between Clifford’s landlady Fraulein Schneider (Joelle Thomas, COL ‘10) and the Jewish fruit merchant Herr Schultz (Brad Glasser, COL ‘11) is charming, but falls somewhat flat given the abrupt shift to Nazi-laced stupor in the second act. The musical numbers, however, remain strong: “Two Ladies” and “Don’t Tell Mama” are stand-outs, and the range of voices is impressive throughout.
As time drags on between songs, you might find yourself glancing at your watch a couple of times, but the great costumes and set and the glittering cast that fills them are fully worth the time invested.
