Dark immersive production Bowles critics over

Playhouse Theatre (KitKat Club)

Cabaret is the top rated West End show of the 2020s. Only the eye-watering ticket prices have prevented it from being top value. The original stars Eddie Redmayne and especially Jessie Buckley (as Sally Bowles) were a significant focus of the many 5 and 4 star reviews, but the many subsequent replacements have shown that Rebecca Frecknall’s production is the true strength of the show. It is a dark interpretation of Kander and Ebb’s musical that uses a dazzling transformation of the Playhouse into the KitKat Club, and immersive elements within the performance to dupe the audience into being complicit in the growth of Nazism. The extracts from the reviews from the opening night that are reproduced below concentrate on the production rather than the stars.

5 stars ★★★★★

Nick Curtis of the Standard was Bowlesd over: ‘Wow. Rebecca Frecknall’s new revival of Kander and Ebb’s musical set in interwar Berlin is a stunning, breathlessly exciting theatrical happening. It feels loyal to the 1966 original yet astonishingly contemporary, and properly immersive.’

WhatsOnStage‘s Sarah Crompton declared: ‘The stamp of a great work of art is that it can bear many interpretations. Director Rebecca Frecknall…has taken Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical and completely reimagined it. The result is both shattering and utterly magnificent.’ She went into detail: ‘ Scutt’s costumes are a riot of soft colour and texture, and Julia Cheng’s extraordinarily detailed choreography creates a tawdry, sexualised world, where everyone gets to express themselves and no-one is quite what they seem. By the close of a devastating night in the theatre, that image has been replaced with beige uniformity and straight lines of movement…The result, central to Frecknall’s thinking, is terrifying, with a darkness that reaches all the deeper because the audience has been made to feel complicit.’

Marianka Swain for BroadwayWorld said: ‘We came here to escape, but we emerge shattered. This is musical theatre at its absolute finest. A total knockout.’ She described ‘Julia Cheng’s rich choreography’: ‘a mix of styles, from jazz and contemporary to waacking, with angular freezes, chest pumps, swaying and shimmies – knowing and challenging.’ And how ‘Isabella Byrd’s exceptional lighting design creates eerie shadows, casts the characters in sudden shafts of light, or uses the lamps in the audience to draw us into the performance.’

Tim Bano at The Stage pointed out: ‘Frecknall’s direction doesn’t let style sideline substance. Perhaps her strongest play is the careful balance she maintains in terms of the Nazis as metaphor and as literal Nazis. This is a production specifically about antisemitism and the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany. It’s also about attacks on sexuality, gender, ethnicity and religion – or any other marker of identity at any other time.’ He ended: ‘While the whole nonsense of the Kit Kat Club – the secret entrance, the champagne – is completely at odds with what the musical is really about (not to mention the eye-watering ticket prices), it’s also perfect: the production dupes us, turns us into delusionists just like Sally, Cliff and the rest. It tricks us into feeling as if we’re at a party when really we’re at the most visceral display of political theatre in the West End.’

The Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish wrote that Rebecca Frecknall ‘creates an immersive evocation of the Kit Kat Club, the early-1930s Berlin dive in which much of the action is set. She supercharges the ambience, though. The whole Playhouse has become a louche playground. In the modified auditorium, ranged with tables and with a raised, often revolving circular wooden stage at its heart, old-world decorum mingles with wild abandon.’

Roz Wyllie for LondonTheatre1 said: ‘The whole production is about as good as theatre gets; with every shade of emotion and absolutely no wasted dialogue or scene. It’s tight, it’s tender it’s shocking… it’s sinfully brilliant.’

Alexandra Pollard for The Independent commented: ‘Back in the Sixties, the musical’s original director Hal Prince called Cabaret “a parable of contemporary morality”. In such capable hands, it’s a parable that still packs a punch.’

4 stars ★★★★

Time Out‘s Andrzej Lukowski described the design: ‘the Playhouse Theatre has been heavily retooled by designer Tom Scutt, and literally renamed the Kit Kat Club… Scutt’s revamp is extremely classy. From opening up backstage areas and drenching them in atmospheric lighting to creating a secondary, gold-draped performance space for the fun (if inessential) pre-show cabaret-with-a-small-c entertainment, it’s full of quietly spectacular little flourishes.’ He continued: ‘costumes are angular, vivid, somewhat grotesque; the performers’ faces are sardonic, or sinister, not submissive or lusty. There is an alien harshness and a sense of confrontation and mischief, a feeling we have left the world behind: you really can picture this place as a strange nocturnal bubble removed from the increasingly grim realities of the Germany outside.’

The Guardian‘s Arifa Akbar found: ‘Rebecca Frecknall’s production on the whole lives up to its hype, magnetising us with flamboyant camp and then delivering menace that feels freshly charged.’

Suzy Evans at LondonTheatre noted: ‘Coupled with Tom Scutt’s immersive design and Isabella Byrd’s atmospheric lighting, this production feels like a world away from outside…And Frecknall doesn’t pull any punches with her high-concept approach…The approaching horror and absurdism of this escape is at the forefront, and her highly choreographed tableau feels like a ballet or a marionette show, where someone calculating is pulling all the strings.’

Fiona Mountford of the i pointed out: ‘Despite the immersive backdrop – all credit to designer Tom Scutt – this is a Cabaret that has been stripped back and cleansed of the reassuring layers of jollity that it often wears. Sex might be everywhere, but no one is enjoying it.’

Clive Davis of The Times was harder to please.  ‘Julia Cheng’s choreography for a blowsy set of dancers…never quite overcomes the limitations imposed by the lack of space.’

The Mail’s Patrick Marmion was less impressed than most but still gave it high marks: ‘It may be a little parsimonious in its pleasures, but this eagerly anticipated new staging of Cabaret certainly looks good, sounds good – and runs like clockwork.’

Critics’ average rating 4.5⭑

Value rating 36 (Value rating is the Average Critic Rating divided by the typical ticket price)

Cabaret is currently booking to 23 May 2026. Buy tickets directly from the theatre

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