Outside the Warner Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, ticket holders wilted in the August heat, waiting for the doors to open. But once inside the theater, where Cabaret has finally arrived after a two-week hold-over in Chicago, "everything (was) beautiful." Or the seedy equivalent. The meticulous road show production is decadent, naughty, and, oh, so much fun. Originally constructed in 1924, the sumptuously refurbished Warner Theater is the ideal setting for the pre-World War II German Kit Kat Klub, designed by Robert Brill. (Brill created the sets for the Tony-winning revival at the Roundabout Theater Company, based on director Sam Mendes's reinvention of the classic originated at the Donmar Warehouse in London in 1993.)
Norbert Leo Butz (Roger Davis in Rent) is compelling as the sleazy, seductive Emcee, welcoming us to his domain. In her first stage role, Superman's love interest Teri Hatcher has a smoky voice that is unable to sustain a note without flatting, but she struts her stuff as a particularly brassy Sally Bowles with legs a mile long, a sensuous vision in her chemise, stockings and heels, costumed by William Ivey Long. But then who of her ambi-sexual colleagues at the Klub isn't sensuous, especially performing those wicked moves choreographed by Rob Marshall? As the Emcee suggests, even the orchestra is beautiful, seated on the second level of the deliberately shabby set behind the picture frame of lights, designed by Peggy Eisenhauer and Mike Baldassari.
As the older couple whose romance is doomed by the coming of the Third Reich, Fraulein Schneider (Barbara Andres) and Herr Schultz (Dick Latessa) dance their moment of happiness, mocked by the Emcee under lights made of the pineapples with which Schultz courts her. In the environmental staging, the entire theater becomes Berlin, as the string of golden bulbs strung around orchestra and balcony blink on and off, the actors enter down the aisles, and the Emcee invites audience members seated at the small tables up-front onstage to dance with him. ("Would the two of you like to come out after the show for a sandwich?" he coos to a handsome couple.)
Cabaret is based on the 1952 play, I Am a Camera by John Van Druten (filmed in 1955) and "Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood, which tells the story of the doomed romance between Sally Bowles and an American writer. (In the production at the Warner Theater, Rick Holmes plays the sweetly naive Clifford Bradshaw.) In the 1966 London premiere, young Judi Dench played Sally. In Harold Hal Prince's staging in the same year at New York's Broadhurst Theater, Joel Grey made his debut as the Emcee, repeated in the 1972 film version, directed by Bob Fosse, which won eight Academy Awards, including one for Liza Minnelli as Sally.
In DC, Jeanine Morick is an unexpected standout as Fraulein Kost, who earns her rent at Fraulein Schneider's boarding house by entertaining sailors. Morick's Kost is a survivor, a brassy good-time girl with swagger to spare, and a strong voice that stops the show in the Act One reprise of "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." The cynical book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb retain their charismatic power, enhanced by Mendes's interpretation. At the end of Act II, the music stops and the illusion is stripped away. In front of blank, white walls, the Emcee, his power dispelled, reluctantly sheds his black trench coat (an unintentional reminder of a more recent American tragedy) to reveal his double damnation as a concentration camp victim, his striped prison suit boasting both yellow star and pink triangle.
