Cabaret review – Alan Cumming is saucy and menacing in a sly revival

Studio 54, New York
Cumming, Michelle Williams and a great ensemble will break your heart and lift your spirits in Sam Mendes's production which has the ghost of Bob Fosse in the choreography

Come to the Cabaret: Kander and Ebb's classic – in pictures

The revival of Sam Mendes' Cabaret on Broadway, 15 years after its first run, is a reminder that even shows this familiar can still hold surprises: you can forget it has an almost perfect score, with no padding or bad songs to fidget through like so many juggernaut musicals on Broadway.

And the play is unexpectedly stressful: in this production, which is co-directed by Rob Marshall and stars Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams, you spend most of the second half in a state of gut-clenching anxiety.

The 1998 production was staged in the same venue, Studio 54, and starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sally Bowles, which she played with spiky, unpredictable abandon [see footnote]. Michelle Williams is a very different kind of actor, in this instance gauche, touching, unsure of herself in a way that seems as true to the idea of Sally Bowles as more robust approaches.

In this version, Williams's is almost a supporting role. As was the case the first time round, the show is Alan Cumming's and his MC has to be one of the great stage performances of all time. It's so rare to get a second shot at seeing something this good, you should do anything you can to get a ticket.

Where Joel Grey, in the movie version, was impish and sinister, Cumming is brutish, jack-booted, playing the part with a yobbish licentiousness that highlights just how close the satirist and the satirised come to looking to each other in the end.

It's a hard thing to be saucy and menacing at the same time, but Cumming pulls it off. He is also, in the closing scenes, after the play's intimation of Kristallnacht and Kander and Ebb's convincing fascist anthem, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, a shaking, sweating, fading figure, as if suffering from radiation sickness brought on by the toxicity of Nazism.

Cumming often lingers silently at the corner of the stage, watching the action unfold like history turning back and regarding itself, a still point in an otherwise churning scene that is terribly poignant.

Bill Peck, as Cliff Bradshaw, is a good foil to Williams, whose awkwardness, one suspects, is partly a function of the role and partly down to nerves. A lot of her concentration seems to be going towards sustaining the English accent, but she gets away with it, just; you are always rooting for Williams, no small commitment to extract from an audience and she pulls off the hardest scene in the show – the title song, so shopworn as to have long ago collapsed into kitsch – with brilliant urgency.

The staging helps, everything stripped down to a dark, empty stage, which Williams occupies, spotlit, in a simple black dress and singing in a wayward vibrato that makes it more like a Piaf anthem than a conventional show tune. At the top of the number, if you're in the expensive seats, you can see the vein on her neck stand out.

The show has got gayer over the years, certainly since its early stage versions, and of course since Christopher Isherwood's original, in which the hero's predilections had to be couched in euphemism. (The author, no fan of Liza Minnelli in the film version, thought the best Sally Bowles was Julie Harris in the original 1951 Broadway play.)

But make no mistake, this is all about Cumming, and the great ensemble around him, with the ghost of Bob Fosse in the choreography and Mendes' by turns sly and ferocious direction.

The show will break your heart and lift your spirits more wildly than anything else you can see in the city right now.

Come to the Cabaret: Kander and Ebb's classic – in pictures

• This footnote was appended on 25 April 2014:
The original Sally Bowles in the 1998 production was played by Natasha Richardson, who won a Tony for her performance. Jennifer Jason Leigh took over the role when Richardson left, and this is when the author saw the show.

Contributor

Emma Brockes

The GuardianTramp

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