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grownfairytale · 7 days ago

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If you're not against all of this, then you're for it, or you might as well be

So I saw Cabaret last week and have finally decided to put down my thoughts as promised to those I said I'd write this for. But being me, I also then went and watched different performances/versions (1987 revival, 1993 revival, 1998 revival and 2014 revival) in order to see what works and doesn't for me.

Based on what I had heard about this revival, I had my doubts but after seeing that Adam Lambert was cast as the Emcee, I decided that having a queer Jewish man as the role might add what was missing with Eddie Redmayne just in terms of the character. Whereas the idea initially was (and is) that the Emcee/Kit Kat Club are the soul of Berlin, Redmayne has said the Emcee is the puppeteer or conductor, whereas Lambert has infused his identity into the role, and the choices made are based on survival (https://playbill.com/article/how-adam-lambert-and-aulii-cravalho-are-spitting-in-the-face-of-fascism). After all, as noted by the initial production, Redmayne is a cishet white man with that Aryan look, he'd be fine. Having a queer Jewish man in the role automatically changes that dynamic. Auli'i Cravalho wasn't on when I saw the show but I would have loved to see her rendition of Sally. So, despite my initial misgivings, I did enjoy the show. Anyway, onward to the actual review as well as some comparisons.

The first thing about the show is the immersive aspect. The theater itself was redone to be like a cabaret club, so everything is done via theater on the round. You're brought in through a hallway and given a sticker to cover your camera phone and there are pre-show dancers/performers. There's also an option to buy a package that gives you food/champagne to more bring you into the world of extravagance. To lull you into that false sense of security the first act gives you.

The costumes really are the main way to tell what's going on within the show. Because of the theater in the round aspect of this production, even as being part of a club as there are tables around the stage (part of that initial extra package for food/champagne), there really are no actual sets and instead you have to rely on the performers and costumes. It heightens the idea of the Kit Kat Club as the soul of Berlin. They make the staging work and trust the audience to figure out where a scene is taking place. The costumes begin as being very elaborate for those in the Kit Kat Club, then grow more uniform as the show goes on. From the more unique costume per dancer to a green fringe/flapper dress, to beige essentially lederhosen to finally the beige suit of uniformity at the end of the production while the named characters are more unique, even in this last moment. The Emcee has the most drastic change as he is separate from the dancers while really showing the way the city and country are going. (https://playbill.com/article/in-cabaret-set-and-costume-designer-tom-scutt-wanted-to-celebrate-queer-individuality) This both works and does not work at points.

As previously mentioned, the staging is sparse and as it is a theater in the round, the cast plays to both sides of the stage. The most utilized staging was the use of the center of the stage that moved up and down into tiers. During Tomorrow Belongs to Me (Reprise), the performers singing the song and thus part of the ideology are on the lower level while the two couples (Cliff/Sally & Schultz/Schneider) are on the next turning table that’s lifted silent and then the Emcee comes up in the babadook costume from ‘Money’ conducting everyone - again referencing the way the Nazis are taking over even before the 1933 election where they won seats in government. During ‘What Would You Do?’ this effect was used again so that when Bebe Neuwerth as Fraulein Schneider is singing what is less to Cliff and Sally and to herself, she is raised in the center while the lights are darkened and just on her before she joins the two on the stage again, once more asking and begging for an answer on what should be done. This effect was used again at the end of the show with everyone in the beige suits on the turntable with the Emcee in the middle. Another powerful staging moment that works better in this sort of staging where it’s more metaphorical and symbolic versus a more straightforward production where there are props and sets is during Married (Reprise). The Emcee comes in as Herr Schultz is trying to reassure and reconnect with Fraulein Schneider and is seen wrapping a glass before stomping on it and paper falling down as glass when the brick is thrown in, showing both what would be a typical part of a Jewish wedding ceremony and also representing Kristallnacht and what will come in the future for Jewish citizens.

When it comes to the performances, they were extremely strong. There have been a lot of comments that, for Broadway at least, Redmayne’s Emcee starts off creepy and unsettling and thus has nowhere to go. That he’s more puppet than character. This is not the case with Adam Lambert’s Emcee. Even in the same costuming, when he welcomes you in, he is having fun, being charming, luring you into the Kit Kat Club and the hedonistic atmosphere. There is a dynamic between him and Sally and he’s always there both as a character but also the spirit of Berlin. Despite using the same script as the 1998 Sam Mendes revival, there is a departure during the first time we hear ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, instead using the original arrangement even as instead of the waitstaff, it is the Emcee singing the solo and the male performers backing up with harmonies as they place male dolls on the turntable to turn in counter with the Emcee. The entire time, he’s in a robe and looking at a box and making the decision to put on a blonde wig that is inside of it though we don’t see this until later in the second act. But it is this moment where he makes the decision to go along with the political tides that are changing, instead of listening to a gramophone of a school boy before defiantly saying “to me” at the end.

During ‘If You Could See Her’, the Emcee is in a clown costume as he will be for the first part of the second act and while other productions have had the performer who is dressed as a gorilla in some sort of of get up (pink bra and tutu, full one dress, cover the face before ‘introducing’ her to the audience), this time the performer in the gorilla suit is just in the gorilla suit with nothing else on. I’ve heard people reference people laughing at the end of the song after the “She wouldn’t look -Jewish- at all.” There was one person who did when I saw it, but given the tense atmosphere that was going on during the song as this is done after the window smash and Fraulein Schneider leaving Herr Schultz after realizing what it would mean to be married to a Jewish man, it was more of an uncomfortable laugh than a laugh in thinking the moment was funny, even as the rest of the song is played for laughs and even that moment, there wasn’t an overt sinister moment of the line.

It is during ‘I Don’t Care Much’ that the full transformation has taken hold. The Emcee is in the blonde wig and a beige suit. The layers of the song are such that it is clear he is pushing down his personality, his identity, to fit this new mold. As he sings, we see the other Kit Kat Club dancers in the same suit, watching, especially as he interacts with Sally. Previous versions have the Emcee singing the song away from the action (either without his coat in the 1988 pro-shot of the 1987 revival or in a dress as the Sam Mendes revivals had) whereas this time he interacts with Sally and even grabs her arm as she makes the decision to go through with the abortion and go back to the Kit Kat Club, even as it means losing her individuality as she has put on Cliff’s suit jacket to (mostly) match the others.

By the end of the show, the Emcee has completely changed. Similar to the Mendes version where the Emcee is also the train conductor who sees Cliff off. Instead of the welcoming and fun character from the beginning of the show, the Emcee/conductor is strict, even angry, when asking if Cliff did not find the country beautiful, as if why would anyone wish to leave? There seems to be a sort of recognition as Cliff sees him so when Cliff begins to sing Willkommen, the Emcee begins to reprise the dance slowly as if a flash of memory to Cliff and himself. Yet there is a definite double meaning to when the Emcee asks “Where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I told you so” both as the idea that with everyone falling into line but also, at least to me, pointing out how compared to a lot of problems, at least we are not in 1930s Berlin where fascism is on the rise, even as that can change as seen in the show and history. Following that, the Emcee is almost angry or trying to convince himself/the audience that “there are no troubles here, here life is beautiful.”

Auli’i Cravalho ended up not performing the show I went to, so I got to see Gabi Campo as Sally and she did well. Sally is an interesting character because she keeps so much hidden and instead flits between roles of what she thinks others want from her. The first time we really see Sally’s feelings is during “Maybe This Time” as she looks up at Cliff and pictures a life she didn’t expect to want and maybe doesn’t even want but because someone is offering her stability, she holds onto it. She had Sally’s anger down as seen during “Mein Herr” after being fired with “Mein Herr” as her final performance and lets that anger infuse the entirety of the song instead of going on with the show as previous versions done. It’s when she sings “Cabaret” that this really comes through as she wipes off the make up to fit with the rest of the other performers yet goes on to have a breakdown during the end where she is trying to strip out of the jacket even as she puts it back on, though unlike the others, she doesn’t have the jacket buttoned up and a shirt on under it, instead in her bra and the suit jacket and pants.

Cliff falls into my category of missed opportunities/mixed message with the themes of the show. This production leans heavily into Cliff being queer, even more so it seems than the previous Mendes versions, by having him as a Black queer man, some lines/interactions don’t add up - especially with Ernst Ludwig, who both sometimes seems to maybe flirt with him and also just befriend him - yet as Ludwig is a Nazi (not actually revealed until the end of the first act to both Cliff and the audience), it’s one of those moments where the theme and what it seems the creative team was going for missed the mark by not exploring the race dynamics, even as the original actor for this production leaned into his personal identity and of historical queer Black men for his performance (https://playbill.com/article/how-claude-mckay-informed-ato-blankson-woods-take-on-cliff-in-cabaret-on-broadway). Even by using him as a courier, it is mixed because on the one hand, he would be more noticed by train personnel as well as in Paris, yet also as an American (and this is noted by Sally), Ernst using an unsuspecting American because they are less likely to have their luggage opened and checked. It also adds weight to Cliff wanting to learn about the politics of Germany given they would have a more immediate impact on his life, American or not, as opposed to Sally, who wants to just go one and even says, “Oh politics, what has that got to do with us?” The actor I saw as Cliff, Calvin Leon Smith, does sell the dynamic between Cliff and Sally very well. By overtly changing Cliff’s race though, it highlights one of the concerns I had going into the production, that while the production was very interested in the queer community of Berlin and how the Nazi ideology impacted that, they didn’t focus on the underpinnings of Nazi ideology with regards to the extermination of the Jewish population and racism.

The romance between Herr Schultz and Fraulein Schneider fills the emotional heart of the show, even if Cliff and Sally are the main couple. It’s both unconventional in that we typically expect a love story between younger characters, but also that historical weight of knowing what will come for a Jewish man and German woman to be together at that point and both Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skyball bring so much heart to the roles and their relationship that started as a flirtation to an unexpected proposal (even while it is clear how much they love one another) to Fraulein Schneider realizing the truth of what her future would hold and backing out while Herr Schultz has this belief that things will work out, that he may be Jewish, but he is German and that is what matters, that different parties come into power so why wait, which was a prevalent belief at the time (https://forward.com/culture/theater/610579/its-60-year-old-boy-meets-60-year-old-girl-steven-skybell-on-playing-herr-schultz-in-cabaret/) This is particularly obvious after the reprise of “Married”, where after Fraulein Schneider leaves following the breaking of the glass, he has a staredown with the Emcee, as if finally seeing what is going on in Berlin. Yet even then, he holds onto the belief that things will be fine soon enough, that he knows Germans because he is one. Meanwhile, Bebe Neuwrith in “What Would You Do?” sells the need to survive, to do what she must and will not be judged by those younger than her who have the choice to leave. Because of the blocking with the stage, there is that moment where she is essentially screaming in her head, begging for someone to tell her there is another way, yet at the end, she feels the need to do what she must, fall in line over whatever she may personally believe, in order to continue her business, and simply accepting the world as it is because it is easier to keep her head down.

There are a lot of strengths in the production, however, there are just those missed opportunities and themes that are not quite hit well. There’s the Cliff dynamics that can go either way but underpin some of my concerns, there’s even the way the show ends. With a smaller cast and strictly using costumes more as a storytelling mechanism, there are times where the message becomes muddled because Fraulein Kost is also a member of the Kit Kat Club (Fritzy) and during Tomorrow Belongs To Me, you have the cast still in their regular Kit Kat Club outfits so while there is a feeling of ‘the leopards won’t eat -my- face’, it is still disjointed. Especially at the end, as yes, the costuming of everyone barefaced and in the same suit is supposed to represent everyone falling into line and becoming homogeneous, even those who were once free in their identity, it misses the mark specifically because of the fact you have women in a male suit, which would go against the Nazi ideology of specific gender roles. So while I see what they were going for, it doesn’t quite hit.

Now, there are three main endings to Cabaret and each has its own message. In the 1987 revival, like the original production and movie, there is a mirror that faces the audience. While the original production had the characters singing, in the 1987 revival, there are poignant lines repeated by the main cast amidst the singing of Willkommen:

Schultz: Just children, mischievous children on their way to school, you understand

Schneider: I understand one does what one must

Sally: It will work out, it’s only politics, what’s that got to do with us

Kost(?) hysterical laughter,

Schneider: I must be sensible, if the Nazis come, what other choice have I?

Schultz: I know I am right, after all, what am I? A German

Ludwig: If you were a German, you would understand

Kost/Ensemble: Singing die die die before laughing,

Sally: Made my mind up back in Chelsea, when I go I’m going like Elsie…Cradle to tomb isn’t that long a stay, Life is a cabaret old chum, life is a cabaret old chum, life is… - During this, there is a swastika initially in the mirror with the dancers as Sally is in the middle.

This ending shows the complicity of not just the cast, but also the audience via the mirror as they are watching this all play out.

In 1993, the lines were the same but the staging was vastly different and would be the same staging for the remaining revivals, where the Emcee shows up in a leather jacket and then at the very end takes it off to reveal a concentration camp uniform with the yellow star and pink triangle and (in 1993 at least) the red triangle as well, so instead of representing the soul of Berlin as it falls into Nazism, he instead represents the victims.

Then there is this ending, which Redmayne says represents everyone as the perpetrators when the Emcee/Kit Kat Club are the soul of Berlin. Perhaps if they used the earlier script, or at least for the finale with the echoes of dialogue, it would hit more? I’m not sure. But by essentially using the Mendes script with some minor tweaks to it, something feels slightly off. Or just again, missed the mark in that regard for me.

Overall though, I really did enjoy the production and a lot did hit, it’s just the ending that really feels like it wasn’t quite right even as it was still a gut punch as any production of Cabaret should have.

#cabaret #cabaret at the kit kat club #xii reviews things

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reallyhardy · 2 years ago

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Bestie, please break down those costumes.Plssss.I am soooooo jealous of U🫀❤️♥️

of course!

the 2018 regent's park open air theatre little shop of horrors production is pretty standout visually because (while they didn't change the script by updating it) they did move away from the typical 1960s historical fashion for the characters and instead played with modern outfits and a blend of textures. the whole show had a strong colour scheme of black and white, neon green, pink, and blue. costumes & scenic design was by tom scutt.

we'll start with seymour, as played by the lovely marc antolin. his outfit is all blue, down to his glasses. (why are the curtains blue? you could say for his boyishness, or that he's kind of a melancholy character, or that white guys always wear blue, take your pick haha)

the main bit is a boiler suit made of different patchworked denim in various contrasting stripes and tied around his waist. his short sleeve button up continues the patchwork vibe with the painted brushstroke-esque check pattern. he also wears a shacket at certain points, and while hard to see in the above image it also had a thin pinstriped pattern. seymour is all about pattern mixing. a fun detail to note is that audrey ii's main colour is obviously green: in the centre bottom photo you can see he wore green band-aids on his fingers :')

also: while in these above photocall pictures that were used in promotion here had him in yellow socks, it's important to note that, at least when i saw it, his socks were pink. who's main colour is pink? it's audrey.

actually, her first outfit is also mostly blue. seymour and audrey have the most similar colour scheme so that gives them a strong visual link. so her first outfit is very much giving sexy: she's got a frilly top that we can see her bra through. we have a nod to vintage fashion with her cigarette pants. also while these photos show her wearing fluffy slide slippers, when i saw it she was wearing the little clear plastic kitten heels shown in the design sketch - we can tell this is her 'im trying to look sexually appealing to my boyfriend' look. she's showing it all off.

but notably, her hair is this adorable bubblegum pink shade, so i thought it was extra cute that seymour had socks to match. just a little hint of who he's thinking about.

anyway, during act 2, when audrey & seymour's relationship is blossoming further, audrey debuts a different look entirely:

(concept sketch shown along with a photo of understudy rosalind james.) in dramatic constrast to her 'sexy-for-orin' look, now she's in dungarees and a cute sweater, and she's swapped the heels out for sneakers. also, she's got on a pair of pink glasses, suggesting that contact lenses were part of her sexy look. this look is all about comfort: because she's happy and in love with seymour, who makes her feel more comfortable than orin did, and this outfit looks nicely like the 'partner' look to seymour's outfit.

this is getting long, so the rest is going under a readmore. click through!

so this is her 'sominex' outfit, the look she wears when she encounters audrey ii just before she dies. the clear raincoat is honestly just fun. i think if i recall right the stage directions in the script do call for her to be wearing a yellow rain-slicker, but pink is this audrey's colour, so she's rocking this. the glasses are still on too.

underneath, she's wearing this fun floaty half-blue half-pink nightie with matching 'mismatched' pompom slippers. she is giving everything in this look honestly. the meeting of the pink-and-blue, because she's wearing both her own and seymour's main colours (she'd still love him, even if he'd never found the plant, and all she wanted was to be with seymour 😭)

i'll do orin next:

absolutely obsessed with matt willis as the dentist. as a busted fan in my childhood, i went to see this production specifically for him :') so he's got a much more dishevelled punk look he's very ghoulish with his white foundation and heavy black eyeliner. also love the detail of him having a blacked-out tooth too, really emphasises how he's probably not the best of dentists. his dentist gear including bloody apron is in a very medical neon blue-green, and i love how utterly sci-fi horror the gas mask harness is. LOVE the ripped off sleeves on his white coat. he also had this amazing leather jacket with tooth design on and the ensemble had matching outfits:

get a load of the teeth print leggings on the backup dancer on the middle left, absolutely obsessed. love the 1980s punky vibe for the 'dentist' number. this production makes great use of matt willis' own tattoos: after seymour kills orin, he came back on stage with some dismembered orin bits, and the creative team had gone to the effort of painting matt willis' tattoos onto the fake arms that seymour fed to the plant :')

okay let's move on and look at mr mushnik, played by forbes masson:

small guy, huge voice, absolute standout. they've gone for 'little greasy man' as the vibe here, complete with a drawn-on pencil moustache. his outfit, much like the ensemble, doesn't have a lot of colour, just a fairly normal grey suit with a work jacket. the most notable thing about his look is that while he starts out in a purple bow tie, once the shop starts seeing success, he wears a bow tie in audrey ii's neon green. like seymour's band-aids, audrey ii's colour (and therefore her influence/impact) shows up in the costumes of a lot of the other characters.

let's do audrey ii next then, as played by vicky vox:

so this production makes use of both the usual 'audrey ii is a puppet' situation plus then having the drag queen performer on stage to interact with the other characters as like, the plant personified. absolute LOVED it. let's start with the puppet:

we've got the baby form and slightly bigger form i think here, it's a fun alien looking plant, love the spherical head with human teeth. for the plant to 'grow', a bigger version of this plant head is placed inside of a 'mouth' that can open and close sort of like an aperture:

and upon opening it, drag queen audrey ii steps out. she kind of comes in and out of it, and mostly just interacts with seymour.

this outfit is absolutely fabulous, and i especially love the 'HERE IT IS' pointing down to her booty on the back of the jacket.

then a notable progression for audrey ii's appearance is the changing wigs. we can see that her first wig shown here below is the direct partner of audrey's, (after all, the plant was named after her) and is styled the same way.

when i saw the show, both audreys were wearing different wigs that i thought weren't really as pretty as the ones from the photocall, these wigs are on the left of the above image. i'll call these the round wigs.

the most important thing to note though is that when audrey ii first appears, she has that strong visual link to original audrey. and this is played up in the way that audrey ii interacts with seymour during 'feed me' - audrey ii acts quite flirtatious with seymour and he seems receptive to it and has to visibly shake himself out of it. then in the second act, audrey ii switches wigs to the style in the above middle. during suppertime, there was more of audrey ii trying to be flirtatious with seymour, but at this point he is much more disgusted by it: audrey ii's wig no longer resembles original audrey’s, and by now seymour hates her guts.

the final look for audrey ii via photocall features what seems to be the original wig but with the curls blown out, styled to be more messy and windswept, but by the end of the run during the finale audrey ii just wore the round wig, with the added venus flytrap headpiece and feathered cape.

apologies for the terrible screencaps: the fabric the cape was made of featured green rocky horror-esque lips showing teeth. it was mega. the wig also featured some long pink extensions at the back.

let's go back a bit to some other characters who have been wearing audrey ii's green consistently, and that's the urchins:

they wear these punky, i would say more 1990s streetwear inspired costumes throughout the whole show, and don't change until the end. the two gals on the left wear pieces that tie in strongly to the set, which is a crumbling grayscale newspaper-inspired city/drive-in theatre set proclaiming 'GOD BLESS AMERICA' across the top.

we can see the girl on the far left has a grayscale US flag top, while the middle girl has grey cityscape patterned sweatpants. then all three of them are wearing the bright neon of audrey ii, reminded us and the audience who's story they're telling. out of the 3, my definite fave look is the girl on the right, with the green jacket and shiny 'FEED ME' print leggings. i need those leggings. but yes what we can notice is that 2/3 urchins' outfits align strongly not only with audrey ii's green but with the same grayscale/cityscape patterns that the ensemble wear during skid row & other scenes:

anyway i like that the ensemble's look speaks to like... the set coming alive to tell the story. it's cool. this comes back during act 2 when the ensemble put on gloves that resemble audrey ii's vines and push around shopping trolleys with bits of building set inside:

not so easy to see that they were wearing the gloves, but basically they had long fingers that looked like smaller versions of these vines.

and with all this green let's get to the finale, where everyone has a different look. we've already seen audrey ii, here's the urchins.

lovely and shiny looks, this time they're all wearing the same thing. these are their sort of... idk i guess this is circus vibes tbh? welcome to this absolute circus: the finale definitely DOES have a circus vibe, making clowns of the cast, particularly seymour. here's a look at everyone with audrey ii lording over everything at the top:

the enesmble have VERY fun alien plant costumes on, with a big focus on toothy mouths and floppy tongues (we've seen audrey ii's cape with its green lips so it's all on the same oral fixation) let's take a closer look at seymour's outfit, which is definitely giving clown, considering he was the great fool of the story.

so it's this great big fluffy clown suit over his blue shirt that now his this shiny blood appliqued on, love it, with the green on the limbs ending at the shirt with the plant lips and teeth at his shoulders/waist, implying that his limbs have been eaten by the plant. this is great to see in action!

now let's take a look at the rest which i'm gonna have to show via very low quality screencaps because seymour's was the only photo tom scutt posted. here's audrey, orin & mushnik's 'plant looks', these guys are more like... audrey ii's put them in drag.

audrey's achieved her somewhere that's green fantasy, in a great swirly dress with full skirt and ruffly sleeves, still in her blue and pink colour scheme, in her same sneakers and pink glases. she's also got white lace gloves on. audrey ii said 'okay girl you can have this as a treat'. hers is the least alien-plant because it's like... audrey's fantasy look, and i love that.

orin's in a gold sequin mini-dress, but still his same combat boots. it reminds me of a brad pitt photoshoot from rolling stone 1999. look it up and i think you'll agree and i'd hazard a guess that it was a direct inspiration for this look.

mushnik's got on the long vine-finger gloves that the ensemble has during the meek shall inherit, and then a spectacular sequined set: blazer, bow tie, and the actor forbes masson said it's specifically supposed to be a kilt, because he is scottish and i think chose this as part of his look. he's also got light up gold sneakers, obsessed, and in the close up you get a look at his gold & green cats eye glasses and green lipstick.

okay i think! i've covered all of the main looks, or at least everything that i could find reasonably clear images of. iirc seymour did have a leather jacket for the scene where he's trying to make himself more like orin because he thinks audrey will like that, but i couldn't find any photos.

thanks for reading! i know this was a long post but i absolutely adoooore the visuals of this production and its a damn shame that it doesn't have a recording 😭😭😭

#little shop of horrors #regent's park open air theatre #LSOH #seymour krelborn #audrey fulquard #orin scrivello

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