In each number, the Emcee and his back-up dancers get a new ensemble (including a white-wigged, Marie Antoinette get-up for “Money”). But yet something immediately feels off.ĭespite Kate Bunce costuming the Cabaret girls in garters and negligees, everything feels spotless and dry-cleaned their make-up neatly applied, their hair styled. The opening, “Willkommen,” is a highlight (he even calls one of the Cabaret dancers a “nasty woman,” in the show only winking bit of out-right topicality). Given’s background as a drag performer (under the moniker Millie Grams) does him well, as he expertly banters with the crowd and performs the hell out of each number. There are flashes of Joel Grey and Alan Cumming in Given’s Emcee, but the creation is wholly his – a queer, charismatic minx with a hedonistic glint in his eye. A mysterious emcee (Sam Given, the show’s best asset), caked in make-up and false lashes, welcomes us to the underbelly of Berlin and the saucy denizens who perform at the club nightly. We begin in the Kit Kat Klub, a seedy Germany cabaret during the end of the Weimar Republic. It’s more a missed opportunity than a total misfire. That’s not to say the show fails – there are plenty of reasons to recommend it – but the end result is more a slight stomachache than the bloody gut-punch other “Cabarets” have left me with. This is a “Cabaret” that has spent too much time showering, shaving and shampooing a production whose edges have been eroded under the faucet. But Ivoryton Playhouse’s “Cabaret,” directed and choreographed by Todd Underwood, might have taken the Emcee’s words a tad too literally. But unfortunately, the story, set during the rise of the Nazi party, has never felt more scarily topical.īy the time Clifford answers Sally’s query of “What’s politics got to do with me?” by saying, “If you’re not against all this, you’re for it, or you might as well be” the walls between pre-WWII period drama and the current political environment have already, unwittingly, crumbled before our eyes. “In here, life is beautiful,” so says the iconic Emcee at the beginning of “Cabaret.” The boundary-pushing 1966 musical, with a score by John Kander & Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, has been rightfully popular since its Broadway debut. Noah Golden, Associate CT Critic / CT Critics Circle
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