Chris Eldon Lee reviews “Cabaret”, which is at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre until Saturday 30 November 2013.
Cabaret just gets better and better. The latest production, directed by the remarkable Rufus Norris – heir to the National Theatre throne – is the darkest and most inventive I’ve seen. The highs seem higher and the lows seem lower and the contrasts are starker than ever. Seeing the debauched 8-in-bed high jinks of the Berlin nightclub scene juxtaposed with the tentative, tender love of an elderly Jew for his unattainable lady is a soul searching experience.
Norris puts his faultless team through absolute extremes of raunch and mince. They are brazen and cheeky (in both senses of the word). They arrive suddenly on rolling library ladders or through a huge chain mail curtain. They squat in steel cages and squirm up scaffolding stairs.
The body language is brilliant and choreography is amazing – a heady fusion of Olympic medal-winning gymnastics and industrial modern ballet. The moves are awkward and acutely angular, with the performers physically personifying Hitler’s advancing war machine. The famous Act One closer has the ensemble dressed as highly strung puppet Nazi Youths as they belt out ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’; a sardonic, chilling moment topped by a glimpse of the Fuhrer himself.
The part of the washed up nightclub starlet Sally Bowles is beautifully cast. Siobhan Dillon shatters Minnelli’s mould and brings a sharply defined upper class edge to the role. There’s something of the public school prefect about her. Imagine a young, raven-haired Joanna Lumley speaking the Queen’s English and you’re halfway there. She’s scatty, impetuous and gasping, with a yoyo temperament that oscillates between glitzy hype and deep vulnerability. The way Dillon handles the showstoppers is exemplary. There’s dejection-yet-hope in ‘Maybe this Time’ and raddled, cocaine-induced dementia in the last hurrah of the title song. If you’ll excuse the predictable pun, I was bowled over. And she only came third in TV’s ‘How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria’!
I’d also like to heap praise on Lyn Paul (who was a lead singer with The New Seekers in the 70s). She and Linal Haft bring painful depth to the delicate love affair of two old traditional Germans caught up in the gathering disaster. Their coy proposal scene is smiling-yet-tear jerking and, with the fate of the Jews becoming apparent, Paul shows us the inner struggle between longed-for sentimentality and the steeliness required to survive. Watching re-runs of Top Of The Pops will never be the same.
Will Young was indisposed on press night – but we barely missed him. Simon Jaymes moved up the batting order with ease to give us an Emcee of highly dubious sexual persuasion – all black leather shorts and rugby scrum legs. Like a shape shifter, he is grotesquely obese in ‘The Money Song’ and tiny as a mouse in his hauntingly sad solo. He might want to work on his ‘twinkle’ with the audience, but he put his whole heart and soul into it and was puffing his cheeks at the curtain call.
But here I am dissecting a show that defies division. The overall effect is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts and 50 years after Masteroff, Kander and Ebb first sharpened their pencils, ‘Cabaret’ is as sizzling and sensuous as ever and simply has to be seen to be believed.
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