There has always been a deliciously seamy quality to “Cabaret,” the 1966 blockbuster musical-made-motion picture by composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb, with a book by Joe Masteroff.
Set in an unapologetically louche Weimar Germany of 1929 and ‘30, the era’s scantily clothed jazz scene and anything-goes ethos fatefully rubs up against an emboldened, emergent Nazi Party.
It doesn’t take a musical theater sleuth to glean why the Footlight Players opened its 94th season with the splashy, splendidly sordid cracker of a new production of the Tony-topping show. Directed by Kyle Barnette with music direction by Rebecca Weatherby and choreography by Clyde Moser, it’s now large and in charge at Queen Street Playhouse, where it runs through Sept. 7.
Based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play, “I Am a Camera,” the story spotlights a British expat cabaret star, Sally Bowles, as she becomes romantically entangled with an aspiring American novelist, Clifford Bradshaw, who has rolled into town in search of writerly fodder. At the same time, it unfolds a parallel courtship between Clifford’s never-wed landlady and a Jewish fruit vendor, whose late-life love is on the perilously wrong side of Hitler’s hate campaign.
It’s chilling fare, particularly in its parallels with our present-day lurch into police states and mass deportations. But fear not: There’s plenty to rouse your spirits at the Kit Kat Klub. At Footlight Players, “Cabaret” remains defiantly seductive and effervescent as its rogue’s gallery of lost souls knock back the bubbly and show dark days their hind parts.
It’s impossible to succumb to a prophet of doom, to borrow from the show, when you can come hear such utterly enthralling music play. On an effective set designed by Tori Oakes converging grime and gleam, a zealous, excellent ensemble belts out those well-worn, beloved numbers, often brandishing inventive renditions that successfully shimmy away from heralded versions by the work’s past giants Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey.
Let’s start, as the show does, with the emcee, its lurid narrative linchpin. In this production the role is portrayed by a spot-on, salacious Matthew Willingham, with a creepy forehead curl and flirtatiously curled lip, too. At once tantalazing and menacing, he brings on the bawd, corralling an eight-member chorus of performers (some of whom also perform other parts), almost as if he were a barker in possession of a pernicious whip.
From his first shot across the proscenium with “Wilkommen,” Willingham owns the role – and owns the rapt, delighted house, too. He retains that grip right through to antically barbed “If You Could See Her,” pulling off the dance duet with a partner in a tutu-topped gorilla suit, and to his bitter end.
About those dance numbers: With equal parts unbridled energy and wild abandon, the emcee and company commit themselves wholly to Moser’s charged and cheeky (and I do mean cheeky) choreography. Brazenly canoodling, devilishly vamping, flashing fishnet thighs, and even having a go at an imperfect, if appreciated, can-can, they relish every raunchy, nailing number, all of which are urged along by the formidable clip of the taped orchestral accompaniment.
At the heart of this dazzle and drive is Sally Bowles. As performed by the captivating Giulia Marie Dalbec, she is a chanteuse on the verge of a nervous something, more endearingly twitchy Twiggy than dance hall siren. Sporting garishly smeared mascara and a protective glam-puss fur, she is glib, jolly and charming in her chosen state of decadence, as if all the requisite seduction at the Kit Kat Klub is simply the cost of having a bit of fun and buying finery.
I couldn’t help but mulling on denizens of the more recent, similarly transactional place also called the Kit Kat Klub. Named for its fictional forebear, the now-shuttered one in New York City was cited by First Lady Melania Trump in her memoir as the very start of her own romance, where her future husband first asked for her phone number.
The show-stopper number, of course, is “Cabaret,” and Dalbec succeeds in making it her own, leaving nothing on the cabaret stage. As the song intensifies, her anguish is a blunt force object. She drops her nonchalant affectations as she did her cherished fur, baring the teeth behind her hardwon insouciance in the face of a brutal world. All this is beyond the scope of her paramour, the drop-dead earnest, dashing Clifford, as portrayed by Connor Daugherty.
They are not the only ones to love and lose out in “Cabaret.” As Fraulein Schneider and Herr Shultz, the engaging Amanda Daigneault and Rob Maniscalco both raise and dash our hopes about the redemptive power of the human heart in the face of heartless forces.
But as Schneider herself sings, with a psychic shrug and a penchant for pragmatism, “so who cares, so what?” Until the stagelights dim, we are in their thrall, giddily applauding the spectacle as the emcee ushers in the sound of silence, and we witness our demise.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Aug. 31 and Sept. 7 at 3:00 p.m.; Sept. 6 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Queen Street Playhouse, 20 Queen St. More: footlightplayers.net
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