Life is a Cabaret

If your mind is too full of the Liza Minnelli, Michael Yorke and Hollywood sanitised version of this musical please do not attend. However if you can sweep this from your mind then Willkommen. The Nazis, the persecution based on faith, race or sexuality, all these are rawly laid before you. Never before in the West End have I seen an audience almost afraid to applaud after some of the songs as the harsh reality of their meanings sunk home. Even the seemingly innocuous “Money Song” takes on a deeper, darker tone, the whiff of anti-Semitism enforced by a line in the previous scene, directed at Francis Matthews, Herr Schulz the elderly Jewish suitor of landlady Fraulein Schneider. Their stoic romance, enhanced by fruit, provides some respite from the darkness but is tragically doomed by the storm clouds gathering around them. Casting his painted eye over all that unfolds, menacing, half-mocking is James Dreyfuss’ Emcee, unsure or unwillingly to let us know where his alliances lie, politically at least. Dreyfuss is in his element here, teasing and toying with the audience, the intimacy of the Lyric allowing him free rein for intercourse with the patrons and, but for a brief moment when his guard drops, banishing the memories of mincing ninnies that seem to have been his televisual stock in trade. Shame that the other leads let him down. One finds it difficult to sympathise with Michael Hayden’s Clifford Bradshaw, at times too American, too self-centred whilst understudy Rebecca Bainbridge, though more than adequate in what she did, played the role too much like an English Liza Minnelli, distracting from the deeper themes. Yet despite that the production maintained that underlying current of the rising Nazi demon. The hauntingly beautiful “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” still has the power to move and disturb then as the end draws near the jackbooted Nazis make their presence felt, first on Bradshaw then on Kabaret. The final haunting scene as naked bodies huddle together whilst flakes, of snow or something less delicate, drift down will live in my memory a long time.