'Cabaret' at Encore! Theatre
by Alec ClaytonOriginally published in The News Tribune (Tacoma), March 12, 2004.
Liza Minelli defined the role of Sally Bowles so thoroughly in Bob Fosse’s 1972 movie "Cabaret" that no actress should be expected to live up to that performance. Joel Grey similarly defined the role of the magical-mischievous Master of Ceremonies, not only in the movie but also in the original 1966 Broadway musical.
In Gig Harbor’s Encore! Theatre production, Sharon Eason and Zack Wheeler fill those huge shoes – not to mention fishnet stockings and lace undergarments – quite convincingly.
Eason flirts with the audience with big eyes and a bright smile, and she has a strong enough voice for showstopper tunes like "Mein Herr" and "Cabaret." She seemed a bit tentative on her opening number, "Don’t Tell Mama," but I liked the brazen way she stepped right up to the front row and confronted the audience while singing it. I only wish she had displayed that level of chutzpah throughout the whole show. (What I saw was a dress rehearsal, and I am confident that when energized by a full audience Eason will display the swagger and energy the role begs for.)
As the emcee, Wheeler was mesmerizing. No lack of energy there. His gestures and facial expressions were perfectly modeled on the Fosse/Grey model, and his voice was whispery, snide, gravelly and celebratory in all the right places.
In its various incarnations on Broadway and in celluloid, "Cabaret" has constantly evolved, but the essence of the story remains unchanged. Clifford, an American writer (played by Rex Davison), falls in love with Sally, a cabaret performer in Berlin. He is bashful and serious, and she is outrageously playful and sexy. Their blooming love affair is farcical until the ominous rise of the Nazi Party invades their world of casual decadence.
The beat of a bass drum like the pounding of marching feet announces the unstoppable power of the Party as symbolized in the beautiful but scary song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," performed first by two Hitler Youth (Eric Chapman and Eric Lund) and later by the entire cast. And the tragedy of it all is brought home by a subplot involving the love of Fraulein Schneider (Sylvia Shaw) and her Jewish lover Herr Schultz (Patrick Gerrells).
In the original book there were hints that Clifford was involved in a homosexual relationship. In the movie and in the 1998 Broadway revival, this plot complication was developed more fully, although with a different character in the movie. The revival version is used here, with Adam Jones camping it up as the homosexual love interest, Bobby.
Another change introduced in the revival and kept in this production was to make the love story between Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz much larger than in the original. That change in the story looms large in this production. I think Sylvia Shaw’s Fraulein Schneider is the most luminous and believable character in the play. She is as funny and expansive in her caricature of a middle age spinster as she is sincere in her sad love for Schultz. Her duet with Gerrells on "Married" is heartbreaking.
Finally, there are other changes unique to the Encore! performance that were brilliantly staged by director Richard Kirton. He came up with an opening bit that is a kind of moving tableaux or play-within-a-play that draws the audience into the action. Before the opening act, the actors and stage crew and members of the band wander around, flirt with one another, warm up their dance muscles, tune their instruments and chat with people in the audience -- "Right this way, your table’s waiting." They are, after all, performers in a cabaret, and this is what cabaret performers really do before the show begins.
And at the end they create yet another abstract tableaux, this one powerful and unexpected, symbolizing the only possible ending there could have been in Berlin in 1932.
© 2004 by Alec Clayton