There’s Nothing Like Live Theater: Artful, Scary, Entertaining

This performance of “Cabaret” has everything: pre-theater announcements in German, vivid choreography, striking imagery, a message about blind nationalism that most of the world ignores and an understudy stepping in to play a small role at the last minute.

“This is live theater,” director Bradford Blake declared before the show, with all its thrills and spills.

It was entertaining theater, too. And sobering.

“Cabaret” opens with the Kit Kat girls stretching, flexing, loosening up for the show. They are wearing scant undies and vivid makeup and the kind of impassive, doll-like expressions that make the vulgarities less startling. This is Berlin in 1931. Nazis are taking hold in a country recovering from World War I. There’s poverty and license and forced gaiety and corruption.

And lots of lies.

The Emcee (played by a cunningly wicked Richard Damaso) tells us, “Life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful.” And the girls, “each and every one of them is a virgin.” The trombonist lets out a cascade of tones and encourages the audience to “enjoy the sauerkraut.”

And then Sally Bowles, a British showgirl with red hair and outrageous behavior, shows up. Samantha LaMendola plays her as an incautious child, uneasy, desperate. 

She moves in with Clifford Bradshaw (Michael Schaner), a gay American novelist looking for material in Berlin. Their landlady, Fraulein Schneider (Tracey Marble), stands at the center of this piece. She falls in love with an elderly Jew, Herr Schultz (touchingly played by David Halliwell), and walks away from the consequences. The first act closes with a sailor, a puppet, manipulated by strings tied to a swastika and the chilling song, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

The show is artful and scary and very entertaining.