Total Theatre with a message for our times

The KitKat Club at The Playhouse

⭑⭑⭑⭑

It’s taken me four years to get round to seeing Cabaret at the KitKat Club, the venue formerly known as The Playhouse. The original stars of Rebecca Frecknall‘s production, Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley, have long gone, and indeed many other pairs have played The Emcee and Sally Bowles in the intervening years. Even Rob Madge and Hannah Dodd, whom I saw, have now moved on.  But Cabaret at the KitKat Club remains the best show in London’s West End, and should be seen by anyone who loves musical theatre. Having said that, in my opinion, it’s not the best production of Cabaret ever. 

Rebecca Frecknall isn’t the first director to come up with the idea of turning the whole theatre into the KitKat Club, that being the name of the venue where the cabaret part of the musical takes place. I saw a production in Berlin back in 2018 that did just that. And most famously, and possibly the first to do it, was Sam Mendes‘ production at the Donmar Warehouse back in 1993. But I doubt anyone has done it with such complete dedication and thoroughness as Ms Frecknall.

You, the audience, are invited to get to the theatre an hour or more before the show begins. Even the outside of the old Playhouse has been rebranded the KitKat Club. You enter through the Stage Door, and go straight into the basement. Normally the secret home of dressing rooms, the main corridor has been changed into a bar area with subdued lighting and performers playing music and generally standing around looking degenerate. significantly, the signage is in English and German. Oh, and you’re offered a free shot of Schnapps. So, from the start, you are immersed in the decadence of Berlin’s hedonistic nightlife.

Then, it’s up the stairs to another bar where sexily clad dancers and musicians of indeterminate genders entertain in the sultry style of the Jazz Age. And so into the main house. The first shock is that the seating and layout of the old Playhouse has been completely ripped out. Instead of a proscenium arch stage and straight rows of seats, the circular stage area is in the middle of the auditorium with the audience on two sides, traverse style. Tables and chairs are in the immediate areas on either side of the stage. These are very expensive by the way, and have given the show its reputation for being high priced.  Beyond them are much more reasonably priced rows of seats, which are curved thus adding to the feeling of intimacy.

My row, which was G about six from the front, had a great rake, fantastic legroom and even a shelf for drinks. There are similarities with the Mendes production- it too utilised a small bare stage with some of the audience sitting at tables in front of it but in this production, we are all  in the KitKat Club circa 1929. This is total theatre that couldn’t be anything but a live show. Special credit here to Tom Scutt‘s set and costume design.

The dance and music continues as we wait for the show to begin. Our Emcee tonight is Rob Madge, who is fabulous as a threatening clown. It’s a part that can be played more sympathetically but Rebecca Frecknall chooses to go with the ‘leave your troubles outside’ cue and makes him lascivious, waspish, amoral and apolitical. So when he sings I Don’t Care Much in the second act, a song you won’t recognise if you only know the movie, there is no bravado, no irony, he really doesn’t seem to care.

Interestingly when Hal Prince first put together the musical in 1966, the Emcee was there to hold the show together but was not considered a major character. Joel Grey- and the audiences- changed all that. Now he is the conduit between us and the stories. And because he is our guide, and this is theatre, where the relationship between each other and with those on stage is uniquely intense, we are carried along by the fun of the cabaret, and become onlookers at the world outside the club.

That’s where we meet the gay, or maybe bi-sexual, American journalist Cliff – a sensitive performance from Daniel Bowerbank when I saw it- who becomes friendly with a Nazi called Ernst and a nightclub singer called Sally Bowles with whom he falls in love. More of her in moment, but first the other love story. Cliff’s landlady Fraulein Schneider falls in love with a Jewish fruiterer called Herr Schultz. It is a delicate romance between two lonely people in their autumn years, touchingly conveyed by Vivien Parry and Fenton Gray. Their songs It Couldn’t Please Me More and What Would You Do tighten the chest. As Act One ends, their relationship is broken up by the Nazis.

All this is taking place on the same bare stage that is the focal point of the KitKat Club. So we can quickly switch to cabaret songs which are a commentary on the stories: The Emcee sings and performs Two Ladies, parodying Cliff’s bisexuality. We hear the strirringTomorrow Belongs To Me quite early on, showing the apparently innocent but faintly sinister appeal of patriotism, that will drive the Nazi campaign. And If You Could See Her (the gorilla song) exposing the way the Nazis portray the Jews as sub-human.

The score is one of the best of all musicals with its evocation of the period, its exposition of character and plot, and its commentary on the action. There are so many great songs but two of the best are sung by Sally Bowles. I wasn’t sure about the jolly hockey sticks voice adopted by Hannah Dodd. Possibly Sally is meant to be putting on an act of speaking like the high society of the period, or perhaps she is simply a product of a 1920s finishing school. Anyway, Ms Dodd came into her own with the songs. Maybe This Time, first performed in the 1972 movie but now an integral part of the stage show, shows how on the edge Sally is. Desperate for love but also desperate to be something this naive English girl really isn’t- a hedonistic showbiz star. Her life is an vitreous act that could shatter at any moment, as it eventually does.

By the time, we reach the climactic singing of Cabaret, she has fallen apart, and hardly believes the sentiment of her late debauched friend Elsie that life is or should be a cabaret. She sees the mess of her own life and the way her idealised Berlin is succumbing to a sinister political group that won’t ‘live and let live’. The song is sung with anger and despair, not at all like the defiant Lisa Minelli version.

The second act sees the greatest divergence from the Sam Mendes production. In the earlier version, the KitKat Club carries on in its own blinkered way to the end, ignoring or mocking the Nazis until it is destroyed by them, in a shattering finale. In Rebecca Frecknall’s interpretation, the Nazi style gradually infiltrates the club. The costumes become bland, sandy coloured suits reflecting the Nazi uniform of brown shirts. We continue to be entertained but now, looked at objectively, we’re applauding or at least being complicit in the rise of the Nazis.

Either way works, and although I prefer the shock of Sam Mendes’ approach, the result is the same- a stark warning by the writer of the musical’s book Joe Masteroff and its composers John Kander and Fred Ebb against standing by and ignoring the rise of racist, authoritarian politicians under a banner of patriotism.

You leave having witnessed an evening of theatrical entertainment unequalled in the West End today, while this regime was being constructed round you.  Point made.

If you would like a flavour of the Sam Mendes production, there is a slightly blurry film of it, made for television, and available on YouTube.

Paul paid for his ticket.

Click here to watch this review on the YouTube channel Theatre Reviews With Paul Seven