Cabaret - The Lowry - 22/06/09 by Alex Beaumont

You enter the auditorium to find a sign in sparkling pink:

WILKOMMEN

It’s a friendly word in what some say is an unfriendly language. But this isn’t the Germany of our contemporary prejudices, the Deutschland of precision engineering and vorsprung durch technik. It’s bohemian Berlin at the tail-end of its 20s decadence, saturated with saucy perversions: beer, brothels and sweet little things that will take you to heaven before you’re sent to hell.

It’s the Berlin of seedy joints like the Kit Kat Klub, where American writer Clifford Bradshaw meets 19-year-old Sally Bowles. She’s the star attraction, stunning the audience night after night with her voice – and her lungs. But she’s also a gin-sodden prima donna, too feisty for her own fishnets, and one evening the club’s Emcee turfs her out and tells her not to come back.

She turns up at Clifford’s garret looking for a room mate, and together they enjoy everything the Berlin nightlife has to offer: the boys and girls, whips and chains, stockings and suspenders. It’s their lascivious little paradise – that is, until politics get in the way. Because it’s 1931, and everybody knows what Germany (and the world) is in for next.

The Nazis are on the march, reminding the Deutsches volk of its wholesome morals, shutting down the bars, beating up the Jews and seizing power by any means necessary. Now Sally and Clifford must decide whether to stay or to flee, and their actions will soon expose the superficiality of the bond between them.

This is the story of Cabaret, the multi-Tony Award-winning musical by Joe Masteroff, Fred Ebb and John Kander, which premièred on Broadway in 1966. Since then it’s been revived numerous times and turned into a film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liz Minnelli. The Birmingham Rep’s current production is at the Lowry until Saturday, and for any fan of the camp and kinky, it’s a must-see.

Samantha Banks – of I’d Do Anything fame – is a perfectly prurient Sally while Hollyoaks’s Henry Luxemburg cuts an appropriately lugubrious Clifford. Though his singing isn’t up to much, Wayne Sleep dazzles as the Emcee and deploys a number of charismatic in-jokes to keep the audience entertained during the production’s quieter moments.

The design is excellent and the direction spot-on. It’s saucy without going over the top, which renders the concluding tableau all the more sobering. Swastika armbands are one thing, but to see the cast stripped to the nude and cowering as if in a gas chamber reminds us that, glitzy as it may be, this is anything but meaningless escapism. Contrary to Sally’s delusional self-assurances, life is anything but a cabaret.