Cabaret - The Microwaved West End version, or the Real Thing?

I decided to celebrate Boris Johnson's victory in the mayoral election by going to see Cabaret, a musical about the rise of Nazism in Germany.

The enjoyable message being peddled is that 'life is a cabaret', in short that that life is short and so you may as well enjoy yourself. The only problem with this production is that the 'life is short' message comes across rather too strongly, and 'you may as well enjoy yourself' is lost in the historical doom and gloom which sweeps across the production.

The hero, Clifford, is a mongrel creation. Cabaret's creators.turned Christopher Isherwood (upper-class English homosexual) into a middle-class straight-seeming American to create the role, and it is played on stage by someone English. The character sinks somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic. Much more enjoyable is Herr Schulz, Jewish/German costermonger who woos his landlady by bringing her a pineapple and saying that, if he could, he would fill her whole room with pineapples. I would congratulate the actor by name but I left my program in the theatre.

The evening's entertainment is presided over by the 'Emcee' character, who up until recently had been played by Julian Clary, but is now done by Alistair McGowan. Again, there is something slightly odd about casting McGowan, who is probably most known for playing a henpecked Beckham, to be the personification of everything that is wild, sordid, sexual and so on.

However this character has the best 'turns' on stage: a routine where he plays a man with two women in his bed (lots of fun with a mechanical rolling bed fitted with curtains to reveal rubber breasts, fake penises and so on) and a routine with a specially adapted costume - from the front McGowan was a bridegroom, but the rear of the suit was made out to be a wedding dress with a mask on top, so that he could turn around and dance the part of the bride. The final one involved McGowan dancing in an excellently made fat suit whose balloons were eventually popped by surrounding dancers.

The strangeness of the play in part results from these nuggets of stagecraft ( the 'cabaret' element of the play ) being tacked onto the the story of the mainplot, which is a slow-moving and not-very-moving tragedy concerning two relationships breaking up under the rise of Nazism. The latter is standard sentimental musical fare, made for a dedicated audience, nice lighting and lots of stage machinery. The cabaret 'turns' are the result of an entirely different economic form, in which performers have 6 minutes total to grab the attention of a more-or-less drunk audience. These nights still exist - I have stage-managed one at the Clerkenwell Theatre ( http://www.timeout.com/london/clubs/events/645517/warped-a_journey_through_the_ages_of_variety.html ) which is highly recommended. At this night I have seen a woman rip a piece of newspaper the width of a hand apart with the crack of a whip, from 5ft away. The audience member holding the sheet of paper was suitably impressed and scared. I have seen a man walk on his hands across the stage whilst swinging a hoop from his foot.

The point is that, in the unforgiving conditions of cabaret nights only routines which have all the invention and choreography of much longer productions, or some incredible skills, packed into a very tight timeframe, will survive. As a result, when put into a baggy musical, they make the baggy musical look rather uninteresting by comparison. Especially when the baggy musical sits on top of the excellent cabaret material and makes it do its bidding: to wit the routines in which the dancers were directed to dance languidly signalling 'decadence', or in which the heroine must be impeded from singing by her tears in the final number. Brel never had to snuffle during a song to broadcast emotion.

To put the above in other terms, this is a production with a split personality. Unfortunately the West-End musical element believes itself to be superior to the Cabaret element, and sits on it, whereas in my book, even though cabaret is 'low-culture' and therefore may be seen to be below a musical, it is often technically superior. The musical side of this production could have learnt a lot from the cabaret side. But it didn't. It talked down to it, made it do the household chores, and sat eating Nutella out of the jar and watching television. And thus 'Cabaret' was born.

All in all a good production, but only interesting for those genuine cabaret routines it revives. Check out 'Warped' instead, at the Clerkenwell Theatre every Saturday, for the real thing.