Review: A Dynamic and Galvanizing CABARET at the Studio Theatre Tierra Del Sol in the Villages

“There was a war--and I survived.  There was a revolution--and I survived.  There was an inflation--billions of marks for one loaf of bread--but I survived.  And if the Nazis come--I will survive.  And if the Communists come--I will still be here--renting these rooms!  For, in the end, what other choice have I?” --Fraulein Schneider in CABARET

“Wake up, Sally.  The party’s over.”  --Cliff Bradshaw in CABARET

The moment I heard that CABARET was being performed at a theatre in the Villages, the famous community for the elderly in Sumter County, nightmarish thoughts filled my head.  Will the Emcee be played by an AARP member who’s had a hip and knee replacement?  Will Sally Bowles perform “Don’t Tell Mama” with the help of a walker?  What’s next? A group of seventy-year-old balding T-Birds performing Grease, or the Red Hat Society tackling Annie?  What did I get myself into? 

Driving through the Villages for the very first time on the way to the theatre, I realized that this modern-day Pleasantville must be the Golf Cart Capital of the World.  The vehicles were everywhere, more prevalent than regular automobiles, the denizens of the Villages looking so relaxed as they zipped around on them with the glee of a child’s first visit to the Magic Kingdom.  The houses and lawns that I sped by looked immaculate, maybe too immaculate like The Stepford Wives meets The Sunshine Boys.  “In here,” I thought, quoting a famous line uttered by the Emcee in CABARET, “life is beautiful.” 

When I finally arrived at the Studio Theatre Sierra Del Sol and walked into their wondrous establishment to watch CABARET, I took a deep sigh of relief.  I immediately understood that all of my fears of a production peppered with the likes of elderly blue-haired Kit Kat Club dancers in wheelchairs proved unfounded.  This particular production would turn out to be a vital, robust CABARET, as sexy, thrilling, and terrifying as the show must be. The audience may have featured many octogenarians (I was one of the youngest ones there, at 61), but the production burst with youthful verve.  It’s rightfully dangerous, exceedingly entertaining and, to quote the iconic Sally Bowles, “perfectly marvelous.” This CABARET may be performed in the Villages, but it is not a production put on by the Villages.

And what a production it turned out to be!

With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff based on the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, CABARET may be the most frightening musical ever.  Although set in the early 1930s, it mirrors whatever time period it’s playing in. In the original 1966 Broadway production, the legendary Hal Prince and set designer Boris Aronson included a large mirror hung on the stage, reflecting the audience to itself. The inclusion of the mirror suggests that, though set in the 1930s, the actions in CABARET are still pertinent. In the Studio Theatre production that I just saw, there is no large overhead mirror; instead, at the climax, the lights shine bright, our eyes squinting as the sound of railroad boxcars and a deafening drum converge, exposing an empty stage with the audience suddenly illuminated; in the end, we're left only seeing ourselves, where the 1930s have fast-forwarded straight to today.  The Cabaret never ends.  It’s a sad cycle, where new authoritarians rise; new victims get ostracized by a society numbed by economic woes and ready to blame anyone who doesn’t fit the straight white patriarchal mold; and new wars ultimately begin.  Although CABARET remains one of my all-time favorite musicals, I just wish it wasn’t always so damned timely. 

Set during the waning days of Weimar Republic, just as Nazism begins its historic and horrific rise, the show follows a young would-be author, Cliff Bradshaw, who ventures to Berlin in search of something to write about. Through his eyes, we meet the creatures of the seedy Kit Kat Club, led by a wickedly fun Emcee and the club’s headline singer, Sally Bowles.  Cliff and Sally hook up and their relationship disintegrates as Germany dives head-first into the Third Reich. The show opens and closes on a train to and from Germany, and we feel like we’re on that train as well throughout the entire production…a train that ultimately steers us into the darkest corners of humanity, where eventually the ashes of murdered Jews rain down over Nazi extermination camps. It’s a locomotive we want to stop, but we cannot; history won’t let us.       

Act 1 of CABARET is a party, a bacchanalia that ends the moment a swastika makes its first appearance.  And Act 2 is the hangover that will soon defile an entire country.

As the Emcee, our tour guide into hell, Zummy Mohammed exudes a sort of gleeful danger and menace. He’s alluring and terrifying, both seducer and jester, Casanova meets Pennywise. He’s a physical presence, always on the prowl, leaping and flipping in the air.  He hovers around the stage, sometimes peering through a magnifying glass, stalking the action.  As the show grows darker, he becomes more battered and beaten, bruises appearing on his face.  Donned in a corset, ripped stockings, and a white clown collar like something found in an old Dutch painting (superb and inventive costumes care of Cory H. Garrett), Mr. Mohammed is an Emcee for the ages.  His nipples are x’d out with black tape, and a pink triangle is tattooed over an eye. This isn’t your homunculus Capote-like Emcee; he’s not some Joel Grey painted-face ragamuffin.  With Mr. Mohammed, this is delightfully rough stuff, pure punk.  

There’s a moment when the Emcee acts the part of a wind-up toy, and when they wind him up, he mouths the words (sung by a child) to the scary nationalist ode, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”  Then the wind-up toy comes to a halt, and he falls forward as his voice dies, and one of the Kit Kat Club girls gets an audience member to wind him back up.  It’s fantastically creative, part of what separates this CABARET from so many other less-gripping productions.

In my favorite song of the show, “I Don’t Care Much,” the Emcee is dressed like Caesar, gold-leaf crowned and robed.  Caressing his arms with a washcloth, he quietly bathes himself and his wounds, as the storyline pushes forward as the couples and the country are headed toward their inevitable doom.  And his last moments of the musical, when we see where all of this will lead, will cause you to suck in your breath. It’s devastating.

Maya Rowe was born to play Sally Bowles.  She captures every side of Sally’s personality--the annoying flirtatiousness,  the forced joy, the lack of attention span, and the desperation to feel like being part of something, anything.  And then when given the chance between peace and decadence, a stable relationship and rocky one-night-stands, pregnancy and freedom, she picks the latter.  That’s what the song “Cabaret,” perhaps the most famous show tune of all, is really about.  Yes, we all adore Liza Minnelli’s stirring version in the movie, a true diva classic, but in the play, it’s a plea for liberation, unshackling yourself from the anchoring of motherhood.  It’s a last stand between the deathly hollows of a safe life and deadly youthful recklessness. And Ms. Rowe envelopes all of this. 

In the title song, she starts slowly, hesitantly, unsure of what she wants.  Egged on by the Emcee, Sally plunges head first in the song’s meaning, desperately coming to terms with her selfish desires. She stands tall, stripped down both in costume and emotionally, and makes her choice.  It’s an incredible moment, and those not used to the song being performed this (correct) way, are in for a real treat here.

Incidentally, when Ms. Rowe’s Sally sang of “the happiest corpse I’ve ever seen,” an audience member laughed, and the actress suddenly darted her head, looked at the audience member, and pleaded her stance through the song. She also got laughs when she snorted cocaine soon after that, which seemed an odd reaction to me because Sally's pregnant here and it's not a laughing matter.  I guess the audience was going to have a hell of a good time no matter what, even when the tide of this CABARET starts turning, even when the lead character sadly breaks down before our very eyes.  Her performance of the song is fierce, guttural, a veritable kick in the groins.

As Fraulein Schnieder and Herr Schultz, the heart and soul of the show, Regina Harbour and Mark N. Miller have wonderful chemistry.  You can’t help but smile when Ms. Harbour gushes over a pineapple (a gift from her suitor), and you swoon when they croon “Married,” two older people coming together in hopeful wedded bliss to silence that loud, empty space called loneliness.  (During the song “Married,” an older woman sitting near me swayed and hummed along as if she were caught up in their reverie.) But alas, CABARET'S soul is dark, and the end of their relationship over his being Jewish and her want for survival is almost too painful to witness.

The bearded Mr. Miller is full of life, joyous, one of the most vigorous interpretations of Herr Schultz I have seen.  And the very talented and real Ms. Harbour gets to sing one of the forgotten gems of musical theatre, “So What?’, a sort of philosophy of surrender of the times: Bad things happen; what can you do about it?  And her Act 2 number, “What Would You Do,” is withering, with the band bringing out the bass, the constant sound of trains, the rumble of the rails.  And the song really points at us, the audience, asking us the same question, making us look at ourselves if faced with similar circumstances: What would we do?  With Ms. Harbour breaking your heart here, you will be hard-pressed to find a better rendition of the song.

Joseph Carrier is quite natural as the tall Everyman, Cliff Bradshaw.  Unlike other versions of the show where Cliff recedes into the background, Mr. Carrier is front and center, our surrogate into this party-hardy hellhole.  As the poisonous prostitute, Fraulein Kost, Whitney Morse gives one of the best performances of the night, seething with venom as she cuddles her sailors and spars with Fraulein Schneider.  At one point, during the song “Married,” she sings it in German as the couple dances, and it’s a lovely moment amid the terrors.. But Kost shows her true colors at an engagement party that turns sour quickly due to her stellar rendition of Kander & Ebb's terrifying pro-Nazi anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

Russell Stephens shines with likability as Cliff's German friend, Ernst Ludwig, but when he shows his true politics, he becomes something quite scary.  In a moment near the end of Act 1, he dons a swastika, and the audience becomes rightfully horrified at the sight of it.  We never look at him the same way, and when he raises his voice to announce his antagonism towards the Jews, we’re almost knocked out of our seats in shock.  He was always such a  nice guy…or so we thought. 

The Kit Kat Club dancers, beautifully played by a sextet of athletic wonders--Logan Farley, Jaylon Jazz McCraven, Stella Schwartz, Oliver Ball (my favorite of them), Kate Carpenter, and Ariya Hawkins—are sensational, their dancing otherworldly. With them and the Emcee, the opening number (“Willkommen,” beautifully choreographed by Angel Creeks) thrills, sizzles and seethes; the dancers’ bodies writhe, gyrate, hump and grope. Electric, an orgy of delight.  It’s like the best sex you never had. 

There are a couple of misfires.  In the brazen “If You Could See Her,” the Emcee sings about his love for a societal outcast, ending with the heart-stabbing line, “If you could see her through my eyes…she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”  Usually his lover is played as a gorilla, but in this version, the lover dons what looks like a white bear mask and appears cuter than cute, especially with oversized fuzzy slippers.  I can salute that this is done differently than the usual CABARET, but I also question it, because the white bear appears sweet and adorable, lacking the dehumanization that an ape costume would bring (the last line of the song should sting).  Nazis considered Jews as debased and inhuman, lower than low, and an ape costume rather than a white bear highlights their awfulness and lack of humanity even more.  When the Emcee says the final blistering line of the song here, it doesn’t pack the necessary wallop. 

I also question Cliff and Sally’s fight scene near the end, where he usually slaps her.  Here, there is no slap.  Cliff holds his hand up as if he’s about to smack her, but refrains from doing so.  Why? The slap pushes the story to the next level, gives Sally the added reason to leave him, and gives Cliff the epiphany that barbarism and violence reside even inside of him, the good guy (that’s what living in Germany during the Nazi’s rise can do to a man).  It just seemed an odd choice, too safe for such an otherwise galvanizingly lurid and darkly wonderful production.    

The tech elements of this CABARET are tops.  Scenic designer Joshua Gallagher sets the play in the round in the intimate black box theatre where there are no bad seats.  Lines have been painted across the stage, bringing to mind concentration camp barbed wire or the zig-zagging railroad tracks that ultimately lead to some death camp.  They also suggest the jagged crown of thorns in Otto Dix’s jarring German Expressionist painting of Jesus Christ. Broken tracks hover above the stage, like we’re being led on a rollercoaster of doom, boxcars to a very dark future.   Colleen Doherty’s lighting is hauntingly evocative and almost like a character unto itself (especially when the lights keep coming up on the various Kit Kat Club personal that circle the stage throughout).     

The “beautiful orchestra” (as the Emcee calls it) sounds wonderfully tight, bringing some of musical theatre’s finest showtunes to life with gusto.  At one point they move about the stage playing their instruments--including a large bass, an accordion, a banjo--and then reside behind the audience for the rest of the show. Later, the bass player (Jazmine Whipple) carries her Goliath instrument onto the stage and actually mounts it in a glorious moment that I was not expecting. This is one heavenly group of musicians in a hellish story, led by Alexander Sovronsky on the viola, violin, and accordion (he also plays the Kit Kat Club’s owner, Max).  The other musicians include Jill Marresse on piano, Kristen Duncan on trumpet, Rich Roeske on drums, Bill Neale on guitar and banjo, Jan Misikoff on the clarinet, with Clifford Goedken as an added vocalist.

Last but not least, CABARET has been led by a true visionary, an inventive director who understands timing and story, and who gets the best out of his performers: Nathaniel Niemi.  From start to finish, this is one gorgeous, and gorgeously paced, production.

The Studio Theatre Tierra Del Sol started less than a decade ago and puts on some of the best, ballsiest professional musicals and plays in the state.  For what they accomplish, everyone needs to leave their troubles behind and venture there for some deliciously dark productions, edgy and meaningful.  They are Florida’s best-kept secret. But with word of mouth and with every performance of this CABARET already sold out, maybe folks all over the state are taking notice.  Maybe the Studio Theatre is known outside the comfy confines of the Villages.  Maybe their secret is finally out.    

Photo courtesy of Ashleigh Ann Gardner.