Eamon Lujan, Guest Writer
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is the reason my mom and I traveled to New York. Well, not Cabaret specifically. In July of last year, the show announced they had cast Adam Lambert as the Emcee, starring alongside Auli’i Cravalho as Sally Bowles. I love Adam Lambert, I saw him in concert when Queen came to Denver a few years back. My mom really loves Adam Lambert. She has been following him since his American Idol days. We had been thinking of an excuse to do another Broadway trip, and that excuse was Adam Lambert. The trip was loosely planned the same day they announced the casting, and before noon we had bought our tickets. At this performance, we had the full principal cast for the show itself and three understudies for the Prologue Company. We sat in the East Mezzanine, Mezzanine 1, Row B, Seats 114 and 113.
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, directed by Rebecca Frecknal, is an immersive revival of the classic Kander and Ebb musical. A revival should generally be trying to do something new with the old material. That said, I don’t always mind a revival existing for the sake of throwing a show on Broadway again. The recent production of Sweeney Todd was really just an excuse to put the show on Broadway again with big names in the leading roles, and I didn’t care because Sweeney Todd is a damn good show and the revival was a damn good production.
Cabaret has to live up to the fame of its previous famous productions, namely the 1972 movie starring Joel Grey as the Emcee and Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, and the 1993 London production starring Alan Cumming as the Emcee and Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles. This revival has added two notable elements to distinguish itself from its predecessors. The first of these elements is an immersive pre-show that transports you to the Kit Kat Club, a key setting in the musical, with performers walking around and plenty of booze to keep things interesting.
The second element is that this revival is staged in the round, with the audience surrounding the stage on all sides. The August Wilson Theatre was formerly a classic proscenium theatre. The production went through the process of remodeling the whole theatre, tearing out the old stage to add a new seating area. The stage, designed by Tom Scutt, features three concentric circles embedded into the ground. The outermost circle is a turntable, like the ones in Hamilton or Hadestown. The center circle has a lift that brings characters and props up and down. The middle circle can rise with the center lift, revealing dazzling lights normally concealed underneath. There are four poles on each diagonal end that allow performers to climb them if needed.
We entered the theatre through a side door, where we could hear the distant sound of club music. You walk through a dingy hallway lit in red. At the end of the hallway is a green neon sign for the show’s logo, an eye with a letter “C “ creating the pupil. Suddenly you are in some kind of an alley behind the theatre, descending downstairs until you get into the Kit Kat Club itself. Just before entering, you will be asked to place a sticker over your phone camera to keep you from taking pictures of the prologue or show. The Prologue/pre show was very fun, the performers are very talented and it’s fun just wandering around. My biggest gripe is that the preshow is tonally inconsistent with the show itself. It didn’t feel like we were in the Kit Kat Club, just a club. The music there had a deep booming bass, and I am fairly certain that no music in 1930’s Berlin would have featured a deep booming bass. However, it really shined whenever it was just the Prologue performers playing instruments. The performances themselves were dance heavy, reminding me of shows I would see in Vegas. This is NOT meant as an insult, I love a good Vegas show and they did pull off that specific vibe very well. I can’t say it felt like I was in 1930’s Berlin though, but despite that, I still thought it was a pretty fun time.
Cabaret is a hard-hitting show; the rise of the Nazis and fascism and the ways the show portrays those maps too clearly onto experiences we’ve seen in America as of late. Even if this revival was just putting Cabaret on stage again, I think that would be acceptable and perhaps even essential. It asks us what we would do in the face of rising hate, prejudice, and militaristic nationalism. Do you simply look away and say, “it won’t be me” or “this will all pass soon enough” and bury your head in the sand? Will you face the truth of what’s happening, or instead drown out reality with foolish pleasures? It’s hard to believe this show was written in 1966, and it is frankly grim how bitingly relevant Cabaret is sixty years later, to our current world.
The Emcee, a lead character in the production, is a strange figure in all the shows. Who’s clearly a member of the Kit Kat Club but also some kind of a force or idea that moves throughout scenes. This production portrays him as the spirit of Berlin. Lambert starts the show vibrantly, wearing outlandish and fun costumes. By the end, he and the ensemble have adopted grey and beige suits, and the Emcee specifically has a blonde wig.
Eddie Redmayne originated the role in this production and from what I hear he played the transformation in a very sinister way. Lambert instead looks like a man whose spirit is being broken, solemnly paraded towards a forgone conclusion. Nonetheless, he is a deeply charismatic Emcee, helping to pull the audience into the foolish fun of the first act before the stakes are raised. He is a treasure to watch in anything he does frankly, and his vocal range is just stunning. Auli’i Cravalho is best known for her performance in Moana and Moana 2 as the titular character, but she has been focused on getting more theatre and film credits under her belt.
Calvin Leon Smith is opposite her as Clifford Bradshaw, and the two eventually end up in a strange love affair. Calvin gives Cliff this reluctant energy, wanting to let go and have fun but being unwilling to do it until he’s fully pulled into Sally’s orbit. Cravalho has a beautiful rendition of “Maybe This Time”, letting us really see Sally’s character and emotions after hiding them so well. I want to shout her out for nailing the ending, the complexity of all the emotions she has and the weight of the decisions she’s made are apparent even before her heartbroken rendition of “Cabaret” fills the theatre.
My absolute greatest praise goes to Bebe Nuewirth, who plays Fraulein Schneider. She gave what was undoubtedly the best performance I saw on my entire New York trip. The relationship between her and Herr Schultz is the real beating emotional heart of the show. She speaks in such a way that makes her voice sound old and worn down. Fraulein Schnieder has lived a long and hard life, and we hear it so strongly in Bebe’s voice. We see the ways that love changes her through that voice as well, taking on a gentler quality. When all goes awry, her voice becomes terribly shaky. Nuewirth sustains a long note during “What Would You Do”, able to control her voice so well she can fill the theatre with her voice and sound like she is about to have her voice crack without it ever happening. She doubles over, overcome with emotion and shaking before composing herself again and acting like this is simply another hardship she’ll get through. Adam and Auli’i are really good, but I would gladly go back to see this show again just for Bebe Nuewirth.
Tickets to Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club are available through July 20th of this year. There is no set closing date for this production, but the small ticket window worries me, and makes me afraid they aren’t confident they can extend past July. The 2024 Tony’s weren’t particularly kind to the show, after being nominated for nine awards but only winning one, Best Scenic Design. Adam Lambert and Auli’i Cravalho are scheduled to be in the show until the end of March.
According to Playbill, country music star Orville Peck will then take on the role of the Emcee, and Eva Noblezada will be Sally Bowles. I am not familiar with Peck’s work, but he is famous for wearing an outlaw-esque mask while performing. Tom Scutt’s costumes in this production have seen variations over the years from London to New York. I would not say it is out of the question that Peck’s Emcee costume will be redesigned so it can incorporate masks of some kind.
As for Eva, she is immensely talented, and there is a clip of her singing “Maybe This Time” that is floating around somewhere online. Bebe Neuwirth will also depart at the end of March, with the role of Fraulein Schneider being taken over by Ellen Harvey. Playbill reports “Also new to the company will be Jada Simone Clark as Helga, Paige Smallwood as Rosie, and Price Waldman as Herman and Max,”.
The cast I saw was wonderful, and I have confidence the upcoming cast will be just as wonderful. Due to the nature of the stage and the immersive elements, this production will never tour in any realistic sense. If you want to see it, I recommend you get moving in case July 20th truly is their secret closing date.