Cabaret…

I hate most musicals. In fact if it were left to me most musicals would be banned. A bit like Tories, racists and free speech for morons.

Cabaret, though, is one musical that avoids my anti-musical radar because it manages to combine astute political commentary with a great score and a sharp script. So it was an upbeat version of me (plus the missus) that went to the Lyric to see the show’s latest West End incarnation. And it was a bit of a mixed bag.

The show is essentially two love stories, that of American Clifford Bradshaw and showgirl Sally Bowles and that of boarding house landlady Fraulein Schneider and Jewish grocer Herr Schultz, set against the backdrop of decadent Thirties Berlin as the Nazi Party comes to power. Much of the play is also set in the Kit Kat Klub where the musical numbers comment on the action and satirise the rise of the Third Reich.

Essentially it’s pretty dark stuff with one love story ending because the showgirl is a self-destructive drunk who aborts the American’s child and the other ending because the German businesswoman cannot marry the Jewish man she loves in a political climate dominated by anti-Semitism.

The social backdrop also shows a society that is so glutted and corrupted by decadence that it is on the edge of self-destruct like Bowles herself. So everything about the show should reflect that by starting dark and sleazy before descending into a world where the Nazi Party could actually come to power and the death camps could go ahead…

So enter TV camp funnyman James Dreyfus as the Kit Kat Klub MC and the evening starts off with lots of cheeky comedy numbers. Even the nudity and the dance routines concentrated on sexiness and sassiness rather than sleaziness and that tone stayed pretty much throughout the evening. And that didn’t work when the director had tagged on a gas chamber scene to the closure of the Kit Kat Klub at the end of the play. It was almost an addition to underline what was to come where if the threat of menace had been stronger earlier that particular addition would have worked better

Dreyfus was OK in the MC role but his voice wasn’t strong enough and the menace of the role never really came through. He was cheeky and odd but never scary. I also saw him in The Producers a year ago and he was similarly OK in that but an actor who could really sing (and act) would have been better.

Michael Hayden was strong as Clifford Bradshaw but he didn’t really have much to work with against the squeaking, twittering Sally Bowles of Anna Maxwell Davies. Her voice also just wasn’t very strong.

Sheila Hancock and Geoffrey Hutchings as Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz added some class to the evening as the elderly lovers who cannot share a life. They both brought real pathos to the evening and injected some much-needed depth.

Overall it wasn’t bad and director Rufus Norris made a decent fist of it with some pretty inventive staging, but it’s a symptom of the West End that TV stars such as Davies (Bleak House) and Dreyfus (My Hero, Gimme Gimme Gimme) need to be cast to put bums on seats when stronger actors in strong roles would have served the show better.

Still worth a look, though.