Rising-star director Rebecca Frecknall revisits the classic Kander & Ebb musical about divine decadence and the rise of Nazism in Weimar-era Berlin, manifesting the Kit Kat Klub onstage and off in London.
The Playhouse has been reorganized to give the feel of a club as soon as visitors enter via the basement and walk through smoky corridors into a cozy bar, where schnaps is served and in whose alcoves musicians play, then up again into a gilded space for more exotically garbed music and dance.
For “Money,” he rises from the floor like a demonic creature, clad in black with skeletal markings and a helmet; for his cutely choreographed dance with a gorilla and the anti-Semitic kick in the teeth of “If You Could See Her,” he’s in resplendent clown costume; when he appears in a conventional, if immaculately tailored suit, it’s quite a shock.
Away from the club, where we’re meant to find the heart and drama of the musical, there are mixed returns. Liza Sadovy gives a funny, spiky, ultimately heart-breaking performance as boarding house landlady Fraulein Schneider, whose romance with Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schulz is disrupted by the Nazis; she and the also excellent Levey turn the paean to pineapples, “It Couldn’t Please Me More,” into a masterclass in innuendo and comic timing.
Sally is a tough nut to crack: she’s meant to be a third-rate singer, but we need to be stirred by her numbers; she’s vulnerable, probably an alcoholic, but goes to enormous lengths to hide her fears. Buckley captures the delusional amateur, but offers too little sense of what’s going on beneath the nicely spoken, rather bland English demeanor, or the tools the character is using to navigate her predicament.
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