A celebrated production of 'Cabaret' returns to its seductive ways

July 22, 2016 11:35 AM PT

The time is always right for a production of “Cabaret.” Its slinky songs will seduce an audience in nothing flat, and its story, about the world slipping into brutality while people aren’t paying attention, bears perpetual repeating.

Add that the musical is marking its 50th anniversary and we have ample reason to welcome it back to the stage — and in a celebrated production, no less.

Yet even with so many reasons to be excited, it’s entirely too possible to drift into boredom while viewing the production by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company that’s visiting the Hollywood Pantages and traveling on to Orange County.

The reason? Well, perhaps this staging is one too many iterations removed from its original. It’s a re-creation of a re-creation of a re-creation: a touring version of the 2014 New York staging that revived the lauded 1998 Sam Mendes-Rob Marshall production that itself was built on Mendes’ 1993 London staging. The production is, by now, meticulously crafted, and the touring cast is prodigiously talented. In short supply, however, are spontaneity, genuineness and soul.

Cleverly, this staging never entirely leaves the seedy, raucous nightclub where most of its characters commingle. Even the scenes occurring elsewhere are overseen by the Kit Kat Club’s ever-present Emcee and silently observed by the house band. And that multitalented band doubles as the club’s scantily attired dancers and incidental characters.

The production thoroughly rethinks the show, pulling in atmosphere from the source material, Christopher Isherwood’s semiautobiographical “The Berlin Stories,” as well as interpolating a John Kander-Fred Ebb song cut from the 1966 original and three from the 1972 movie, while trimming others. It also expands the sexuality of one of its primmer central characters while generally sexing things up and, conversely, heightening the tale’s harrowing context within the rise of Nazism in 1929-30 Berlin.

This is a drug-jangled, zombified party at the end of the world, at the center of which stands the Emcee, played here by Randy Harrison, the cast’s most recognizable name for having played the young artist Justin on Showtime’s “Queer as Folk.” Dark hair somewhat camouflages the actor’s blond, boy-next-door looks as he prowls the stage, debauching a willing audience with his saucy, sexually omnivorous spiel. Even through a German accent and a lot of speak-singing, he pipes an appealing baritone, and as he commingles with the shockingly flexible dance corps, he enthusiastically delivers any number of pelvic thrusts and derriere slaps. Trouble is, he’s being asked to channel the role’s forebears: Alan Cumming and, before him, Joel Grey. There’s little room for Harrison to express individuality.

Two outsiders are drawn to such hedonism: a young, aspiring writer from America and a bubbly, would-be chanteuse from England who’s the Kit Kat’s headliner of the moment.

In portraying the singer, Andrea Goss, like Harrison, is expected to conform to a stencil. She’s given a short, angular bob like Liza Minnelli in the movie and the coked-up desperateness that this rendition layers onto the Sally Bowles character. (Goss understudied the role in the 2014 New York staging.) Sally isn’t a born singer, but Goss is, so she tends to keep her whiskey-warm voice under wraps, as with the pinched, Betty Boop-ish overlay she gives “Don’t Tell Mama.” But when she opens up to full voice, as she does at the desolate end of the title song, she’s a powerhouse.

Square-jawed, athletically built Lee Aaron Rosen portrays the writer. He has matinee-idol appeal and a resonant baritone, but like his compatriots, he’s too hemmed-in to seem real — the latest cookie to drop out of the cutter.

The most compelling performance is delivered by Shannon Cochran as the writer’s practical, philosophical landlady, who sadly realizes that her later-life romance with a Jewish fruit seller is doomed by the darkness engulfing Berlin. A knot rises in the audience’s collective throat when — in her rich, dusky voice — she eyes us as she sings “What Would You Do?”

Many of the tale’s characters are too caught up in the moment to notice that Germany’s brief Golden Twenties, with their flowering of open-mindedness, are crashing headlong into a hardscrabble economy and nationwide resentment. The mood turns angry and nationalistic.

“Cabaret,” ever relevant, has returned at a particularly resonant moment.

-------

‘Cabaret’

Where: Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Through Aug. 7

Tickets: From $29

Info: (800) 982-2787, hollywoodpantages.com

Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes

Also:

Where Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: Aug. 9-21

Tickets: From $29