In the Dark Shadows of a Bawdy ‘Cabaret’

On the short list of brilliantly revived musicals, director Sam Mendes’ “Cabaret” sits at the top like a poisoned cherry.

It does more than evoke Berlin in 1929 and 1930. It revels in that rich milieu, diving headlong into the dark allure and raunch without losing sight of the human beings at the show’s center. “Everything is overflowing with dreadful tastelessness,” said Bertolt Brecht upon arriving in Berlin a few years earlier. “But on what a level!” Mendes has theatricalized that universe.

Working from the solid structure of the 1966 musical, this “Cabaret” pulls in atmospheric elements of the Christopher Isherwood stories that inspired it, interpolates material cut from the original out-of-town tryout, reassigns songs, adds key John Kander & Fred Ebb numbers from the 1972 movie--the sole great film version of a Broadway musical made in the last 30 years--and makes it all seem like a wonderful, horrible illusion.

The revival’s still going strong in the old Studio 54 space in New York. Wednesday, the national touring edition of this extraordinarily evocative show opened at the Wilshire Theatre. Teri Hatcher, best known for TV’s “Lois and Clark,” stars as Sally Bowles.

The character’s lost, but so is Hatcher. A stage newcomer, with vocal and movement abilities best described as “eh,” she delivers an overeager illustration of an overeager personality. She’s giving it the old junior-college try, but the role requires more than this performer can muster at this point.

As written, Sally’s an exasperating, self-deluding, second-rate talent, and she calls for someone with a certain set of performance chops. It doesn’t need a Liza Minnelli killer, necessarily. Natasha Richardson, who won a Tony Award last year for the Broadway edition, didn’t boast a big voice. But she burrowed inside the character’s delusions, finding all sorts of sharp, witty details. Aside from one tantalizingly effective encounter late in Act 2, Hatcher sticks to the surface.

People do forget that in the stage “Cabaret,” Sally Bowles doesn’t dominate as she does in Bob Fosse’s film. Since the Broadway original 33 years ago, actresses have struggled to make dramatic sense of the stridently exotic English bird, described in Isherwood’s story “Sally Bowles” as sporting a face “powdered dead white,” “brilliant cherry lips” and an air of “not caring a curse.”

Mendes’ revival works hard, and shrewdly, to give full value to the major characters surrounding Sally. Finally, finally, American novelist Clifford Bradshaw (Rick Holmes) makes dramatic sense, simply because Mendes and company don’t dance around the question of his bisexuality. Nor does the show make the Kit Kat Klub musical sequences cute in any way. Choreographer and co-director Rob Marshall, whose work on various Broadway shows heretofore has been competent but tame, makes a virtue of rampant vice. Strains of creepy, infantalized sexuality underscore every number, as if aimed at an audience of pederasts.

As in the original 1966 edition, the Sally/Cliff relationship is counterbalanced by that of Herr Schultz (Dick Latessa), the Jewish fruit shop owner, and Fraulein Schneider (Barbara Andres), the Gentile woman with rooms to let. If anything, Andres is even more moving than Mary Louise Wilson was on Broadway last season. And there’s a third couple of sorts, personifications of incipient Nazism: Cliff’s friend Ernst Ludwig (Andy Taylor) and Cliff’s fellow tenant, the bankrupt prostitute Fraulein Kost (Jeanine Morick).

The club’s emcee, immortalized by Joel Grey onstage and in the film, oversees all. Here he’s played by a good young talent, Norbert Leo Butz (late of the Broadway edition of “Rent”). Less distinctive and more traditionally hunky than Alan Cumming’s Tony-winning emcee, he’s nonetheless a strong presence. It’s hard to lose in this leering, glitter-nippled role, just as it’s hard to win as Sally Bowles.

For this, the start of the national tour, the Wilshire’s main floor has been morphed into a sea of tables, chairs and upholstered benches, as in the New York production. (The rest of the tour will have to settle for what it can get in terms of cabaret-style atmosphere.) But the onstage imagery counts most. Evoking such Berlin painters as Otto Dix (“The Metropolis”) and George Grosz, Mendes and his designers cut straight to the black heart of “Cabaret.”

Hatcher cannot. Only in her farewell scene with Holmes does she focus the externals and hit her stride. Suddenly all the insecure technique and flounciness vanishes, and we’re left with a note of affecting desolation.

Despite a soft center, this hard, serrated production shouldn’t be missed. “Cabaret” always was more of an ensemble affair anyway. If the show has a star, it’s the city of Berlin--spinning out of control, with a truly demonic mustachioed emcee waiting in the wings.

* “Cabaret,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends April 25. $42-$72. (213) 365-3500. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

Teri Hatcher: Sally Bowles

Norbert Leo Butz: Emcee

Rick Holmes: Clifford Bradshaw

Barbara Andres: Fraulein Schneider

Dick Latessa: Herr Schultz

Andy Taylor: Ernst Ludwig

Jeanine Morick: Fraulein Kost

Book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb. Directed by Sam Mendes. Co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall. Set by Robert Brill. Costumes by William Ivey Long. Lighting by Peggy Eisenhauer and Mike Baldassari. Sound by Brian Ronan. Musical director Patrick Vaccariello. Production stage manager Michael John Egan.