Cabaret
Playwright: music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Joe Masteroff
At: Porchlight Theatre at The Theatre Building, 1225 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: (773) 327-5252; $25
Runs through: Dec. 7
Yes, the orchestra is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. And the Master Of Ceremonies is nothing short of brilliant. But Christopher Isherwood’s account of Berlin during Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre (the ‘golden twenties’) has been cut apart and pasted back together so many times that the decision to eliminate the curtain call for this production—presumably to leave us stunned into silence by the cruelties we have witnessed—is as touchingly innocent as it is ludicrous.
John Van Druten’s 1951 restructuring of The Berlin Stories to the limited format of a play mandated a linear plot geared to audiences for whom the events discussed were the stuff of recent memory. In 1966, much of that plot was excised to make room for a musical score requiring a pair of Kurt Weill-styled ballads for grande dame Lotte Lenya and a showcase patter song for the likewise big-name Jack Gilford. Then in 1972 came the film version, with both music and story once again altered to highlight advanced technical effects, explicit references to homosexuality and, inevitably, the special talents of ITS star players.
This history is reflected in Porchlight’s production: Meg Miller’s Sally Bowles warbles both the coy ‘Don’t Tell Mama’ and the jaded ‘Mein Herr,’ then finishes with a karoake rendition of the Minnelli arrangement that suspends all dramatic context for its duration. Gabrielle Bright struggles with Fraulein Schneider’s ‘So What’ and ‘What Would You Do?’, exercises in atonality near-impossible for modern vocalists to replicate. And a bevy of spandex-clad dancers dutifully scratch their backs on each other’s femoral biceps, but not for an instant are we convinced that they are anything but young, wholesome, healthy, and classroom-trained.
With one significant exception. Rebecca Finnegan, cross-gender cast as the Master Of Ceremonies, commands the stage with a seductive charisma powerful enough to lead us goose-stepping from the theatre all the way to Belmont Harbor like a sinister Pied Piper. But even if she were only a fraction as good as she is, our attention would still be riveted on her. She’s the only thing in this show that we haven’t already seen, too many times, in too many other productions.