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    Review: A Genderqueer ‘Cabaret,’ at War With Itself

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    A revival of the 1998 revisal of the 1966 musical highlights the stories of trans and nonbinary performers.The revival of “Cabaret” that opened on Sunday at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., has a bad case of the Underwear Problem.It’s not the only time the affliction has struck the 1966 musical set in a skeevy Berlin nightclub; indeed, it’s a chronic condition. “Cabaret” first caught the sniffles in 1972, when the Bob Fosse movie amped up the eroticism and rolled down the stockings. And it fully succumbed in 1993, when it was nearly stripped naked for a London production that came to Broadway five years later.In that revival, Sally Bowles, the minimally talented chorine at the center of the action, still wore the “lacy pants” mentioned in “Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many great songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb — but now she and the other Kit Kat Girls wore little else. The club’s Emcee was no longer the weird, tuxedo-clad marionette that Joel Grey created in the original production; instead, as played by Alan Cumming, he was a denizen of an S&M dungeon, with rouged nipples peeking out from a strappy leather harness.This was a purely contemporary idea of loucheness, employed to shock and titillate audiences who might no longer respond to period sleaze. Shock is a losing game, of course. “This same production in 10 years would probably look very tired if we remounted it,” Kander himself predicted.And because the plot still hinged on the rise of Nazism around 1930, the more modern outlook also ate away at the show’s period concept, which depended on a clear alternation between commentative cabaret numbers like “Two Ladies” and naturalistic “book” scenes dramatizing the lives of the characters. Blurring those realms — which the original director, Harold Prince, had taken pains to keep separate — turned Sally, a Weimar party girl in Joe Masteroff’s book, into a neither-world negligee zombie.That’s the Underwear Problem: the perspective confusion that sometimes results from surfacing the subtext and emphasizing interpretation over story. You may, of course, gain something in return; not for nothing did the 1998 revival win four Tonys, run six years and itself get revived in 2014. But when you strip away the social conventions from which a show’s crisis develops — prudery, repression, outerwear, what have you — you leave the action unmotivated and unmoored. It shivers in the conceptual cold.The Barrington revival embraces that denuding and deracination, which is nice for the eyes if not for the drama. That’s not to say it isn’t occasionally gripping and novel at its extremes, as when Sally (Krysta Rodriguez) sings the title song in tatters and with cataclysmic abandon. (The inventively sordid costumes are by Rodrigo Muñoz.) And the book scenes between the widower Herr Schultz (Richard Kline) and the widow Fraulein Schneider (Candy Buckley) — a Jew and a gentile who must eventually face facts — have a graceful dignity when not pushed too hard.Krysta Rodriguez, center, as Sally Bowles performing the song “Maybe This Time.”Daniel RaderBut more often this “Cabaret” oversells itself, laboring to exemplify values that, however naturally they match the “live and let live” ethos enunciated by the Emcee (Nik Alexander, channeling Eartha Kitt) are not a natural part of its storytelling. No matter how much you may respect a production that “celebrates queerness, centers the stories of trans and nonbinary performers and acknowledges that many people of color were also harmed by the Nazis” (as the director, Alan Paul, writes in a program note), that respect cannot hold the musical together.To be clear, I support the nontraditional casting. That three of the Kit Kat Ensemble (as it is now called) are played by trans or nonbinary performers (Charles Mayhew Miller, James Rose and Ryland Marbutt) helps push the 1998 revision’s flirtation with gender diversity in a more serious direction. That Alexander is Black adds an eye-opening racial dimension. And Paul, who is Barrington’s new artistic director, uses the casting expressively instead of merely paying it lip service.That, however, is part of the problem. The original script, and especially the songs, despite the now standard interpolations and deletions, are so strong they continue to tell the story their way even as the director tries to tell it his.At first the tension is useful. When Miller, Rose and Marbutt sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in tender harmony while removing their Kit Kat costumes or combing their wigs, we are willing to accept it as a song of hope for a genderqueer future instead of the sinister Nazi anthem Kander and Ebb actually wrote. Yet later, when the song recurs, we are asked to take it as a mortal threat to the same characters. You can argue about multiplicities of meanings, but the ear won’t have it both ways.From left: James Rose, Ryland Marbutt and Charles Mayhew Miller as three members of the Kit Kat Ensemble, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”Daniel RaderThe same fight between the authors’ and the director’s intentions undermines many of the book scenes as well. Sally’s relationship with Clifford Bradshaw (Dan Amboyer), an American writer visiting Berlin for inspiration, has become less and less credible as his sexuality, altered repeatedly in different versions of the story, has become more and more obvious. Now even Nazis rub up against him, advancing the inadvertent but no less troubling idea that National Socialism was in part a queer phenomenon.I suppose you could explore that idea, but to do so you’d need a much larger conceptual intervention than even this production offers. With just one word of the text altered — a character formerly introduced as “he” is now introduced as “they” — there’s only so much a little nontraditional casting can do. Maybe a lot more would work better.Because “Cabaret” as written is not about personal identity at all. It’s about mass complacency: a society’s failure to awaken in time to injustice and disaster. In 1966, when the Holocaust was still recent history, Prince didn’t need a contemporary lens to portray that danger or make it relevant; the period lens did just fine. So did Boris Aronson’s set, which featured an enormous mirror tipping ominously toward the audience to reflect and implicate it in the story.A mirror features in Wilson Chin’s handsome set for the Barrington production, too, but instead of reflecting the audience, it reflects the stage. After seeing so many versions of “Cabaret” that strip the original bare and rebuild it inside out, I’m beginning to think that’s the real problem. It is no longer a comment on our history but its own.CabaretThrough July 8 at the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      ‘A Little Night Music’ Review: A Rueful Take at Barrington Stage

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      Barrington Stage Company offers a take on the Sondheim-Wheeler classic highlighted by performances in shades of regret.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I thought I’d seen everything you could do with “A Little Night Music,” the nearly unimprovable 1973 musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. But Barrington Stage Company’s bittersweet revival, which opened here on Wednesday, ends the first act with an especially deft touch. As the principals step forward for the final chorus of “A Weekend in the Country,” envisioning their upcoming visit to a grand estate, each carries a revealing and slightly absurd item of personal luggage.Count Carl-Magnus Malcom, a military peacock, has a gigantic hunting bow slung over his shoulder, the better to stalk game or romantic rivals. Anne Egerman, an 18-year-old virgin married to Fredrik, a stuffy middle-aged widower, totes a bird cage. (She’s the canary.) Fredrik’s son, Henrik, struggling to reconcile his seminary ethics with his hots for his stepmom, clutches a prayer book. And Fredrik himself, perhaps not realizing he’s bringing skoals to Newcastle, bears a neatly wrapped and ribboned bottle of champagne.“A Little Night Music” is like that champagne; when the original Broadway production opened, Clive Barnes, in The Times, called it Dom Pérignon. Bubbly it certainly is, especially Wheeler’s ingenious book, based on the 1955 Ingmar Bergman movie “Smiles of a Summer Night.” Henrik loves Anne; Anne won’t sleep with Fredrik; Fredrik longs for the actress Desiree Armfeldt; Desiree is kept by the jealous count; the count’s wife, Charlotte, is desperate for his attention — round it goes.And even though the stage is set for what could be a tragedy (guns do come out), when they all meet for that weekend at the manse of Desiree’s mother, it ends as happily as a Shakespeare comedy — on the surface. The mismatched and damaged souls get repaired, in both senses of the word.Despite that effervescence, though, “A Little Night Music,” in any half decent production, is also about rue. That’s even more salient in this first year following the death of Sondheim, who layered its brilliant songs so densely with varieties of regret. We feel that regret doubly now; for the characters no less than for us, pleasure is always coupled with loss.So perhaps it’s no surprise that this Barrington Stage production, directed by Julianne Boyd, gets the rue so right. Especially in the performances of three of its central women, mixed emotion is always palpable. As the embittered Charlotte, Sierra Boggess offers a sad and hilarious sketch of a wife so steeped in the brine of her own disappointment that she actually looks pickled. And Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s imperious mother, is no senile narcissist in Mary Beth Peil’s vivid performance; she’s a woman clinging as hard as she can, in her final days, to the thrill of a fully lived past.But it’s Emily Skinner as Desiree, the focus of the complex romantic geometry, who most powerfully holds the show’s opposing forces in equilibrium and produces its warmest glow. She’s funny, of course; the scene in which she welcomes Fredrik (Jason Danieley) to her apartment after a performance and, despite his paeans to Anne, consents to revive their long-ago liaison — “What are old friends for?” — is a model of perfectly played situational humor.Later, though, the humor deepens. Near the end of the weekend, when Desiree realizes that her last-ditch dream of getting Fredrik back for good has failed, Skinner offers a reading of the show’s big hit, “Send in the Clowns,” that, aside from being wonderfully sung, is as layered as a lasagna. Beneath her good-sport bravado is anger — at Fredrik, to be sure, for still being “in midair” when she’s “at last on the ground.” But beneath that is something unexpected and even richer: anger at herself for having failed to care in time about the squalid carelessness of a tossed-off, footloose life.Vocally, the production is exceptional, with Danieley a standout among singers including Cooper Grodin as the count, Sabina Collazo as Anne and Sophie Mings as Anne’s randy maid Petra. (She scores big with “The Miller’s Son” — a showstopper but, given to a minor character, perhaps the work’s one misstep.) Every word sung is perfectly clear (the sound is by Leon Rothenberg), and the ensemble moments are gorgeous, almost overwhelming in the relatively intimate theater.Still, on opening night, there was much that needed fine-tuning. Lighting cues went awry, scene changes were erratically paced, wet clothes didn’t drip and a shattered glass produced no sound. More substantially, the men were not yet digging as deep as the women. Danieley’s Fredrik, not stiff enough at the start, has little to unravel as the evening’s profound events bear down. And Noah Wolfe’s Henrik is so floridly agonized that it’s hard to see how his profoundness may yet be appealing.A weekend in the country, with, from left, Sierra Boggess, Cooper Grodin, Jason Danieley, Sabina Collazo, Noah Wolfe and Sophie Mings. Daniel RaderSuch problems will most likely take care of themselves before the show closes on Aug. 28. There’s nothing to be done, though, about the weak-tea watercolor set by Yoon Bae and the odd costumes by Sara Jean Tosetti. (For “Send in the Clowns,” Skinner wears a gold brocade gown with lamé sleeves that looks more like a 1970s Vegas castoff than Sweden in 1900.) And though the reduction of Jonathan Tunick’s original sumptuous orchestrations to a string quartet, two keyboards and one overtaxed reed player is sufficient to support the show’s more intimate moments, the high-spirited ones lack their Straussian oomph.These are among the costs of putting on a very ambitious show at a regional theater without big Broadway money behind it. In that sense, they may be not just the costs but also the glory. It is, after all, no small thing to be able to see such worthy productions — and I’ve seen many here over the years — in a ragged, deindustrialized city like this one. It’s crucial to the culture that complex work be performed creditably at every level, and crucial to the local economy too. Barrington Stage appears to be one of Pittsfield’s most successful concerns.For that, you have to thank Boyd, who along with Susan Sperber established the company in 1995 and will retire as its artistic director at the end of this season. (Alan Paul takes over in October.) Having directed “A Little Night Music” once before, in 1998, when the company performed in the auditorium of a high school arts center in nearby Sheffield, she knows all about its mixed emotions: how the promise of growth and the acceptance of limitation are often the same thing. That’s the gift she brings to the stage at the end of Act I — just as she has brought it, for 28 seasons, to us in audience.A Little Night MusicThrough Aug. 28 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’,’ Saving Its Love (and Pain) for You

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      A revival of the Fats Waller musical revue emphasizes the blues in its blueprints.PITTSFIELD, Mass. — I don’t know whether the creators of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” were sending a deliberate message of ambivalence by front-loading the 1978 revue, after its delightful title number, with a song called “Lookin’ Good but Feelin’ Bad.”In any case, the team behind the rousing Barrington Stage Company revival, playing through July 9 in this becalmed Berkshires city, sure are. The up-tempo zing of that song’s melody, by Thomas Waller, better known as Fats, never completely undoes the sting of a lyric, by Lester A. Santly, that speaks of “weary days and lonely nights” spent “grievin’ over you.”That’s because the double message in this “Fats Waller Musical Show,” as the subtitle puts it, is more than intentional: It’s emblematic. Leaving intact the original plotless structure — which Richard Maltby Jr. hammered together from 30 of the hundreds of songs Waller wrote or recorded — the director and choreographer Jeffrey L. Page has subtly shaped the show to push the “grievin’” further past romance and into the sphere of Black identity.That’s true even in the breezy first act, as five skilled performers sail through insanely catchy and often risqué songs like “’T Ain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do” (which Waller recorded) and “Honeysuckle Rose” (which he wrote with Andy Razaf). These numbers are set in Harlem between the world wars, specifically at the Savoy Ballroom, as Black artists perform for Black audiences.And though it’s hard to have deep thoughts while watching people jitterbug — or while listening to “The Joint Is Jumpin’,” the exuberant first act finale — you keep noticing phrases and attitudes that have been slightly retuned. If Maltby’s brilliant original production favored a perfect coat of Broadway gloss, the Barrington version, which he approved, looks for cracks in the show’s composure.Spangled, feathered and zooted: Jarvis B. Manning Jr., from left, Allison Blackwell, Anastacia McClesky, Maiesha McQueen and Arnold Harper II in Oana Botez’s playful costumes.Daniel RaderSometimes, it’s a matter of design. Oana Botez’s exaggerated costumes — the three women profusely spangled and feathered and the two men wearing the zootiest zoot suits ever — suggest that even the playfulness of self-advertisement amounts to a form of disguise. Hidden in the proscenium of Raul Abrego’s black-and-gold Art Deco set are images of African masks.But in the second act, the meaning of the masking changes, as the uptown artists grow more popular among the downtown, mostly white crowds cartooned in “Lounging at the Waldorf.” (“They like jazz but in small doses,” goes a Maltby lyric for a Waller instrumental. “Bop and you could cause thrombosis.”) Soon the trade-off of authenticity for popularity becomes more disfiguring, as songs like “Your Feet’s Too Big,” “Find Out What They Like,” “The Viper’s Drag” and the devastating “Mean to Me” offer a performative version of Blackness that exaggerates stereotypes of belligerence, concupiscence, addiction and abandonment.Eventually, after an egregious bit of minstrelsy called “Fat and Greasy,” when the high spirits become impossible to maintain, the show takes a silent, sour pause. This puts “Black and Blue,” the climactic number, in a new context, or perhaps a clearer version of the original one. Its lover’s complaint of a lyric — “Browns and yellers, all have fellers/Gentlemen prefer them light” — moves outward to a consideration of injustice, in which the value of Black skin (“my only sin”) is set by white beholders.You wouldn’t think a show that trades in virtuosic swing could drop so deep and keep its balance, but then an ambivalence about appropriation is clearly part of Waller’s blueprint. (The tricky piano runs aren’t running from nothing.) Yet Page never goes so far as to strip the songs of their ticklish pleasures while stripping them of their varnish. More varnish might actually help; opening after just three days of previews, the production needs more shine. The sound is still muddy and the lighting still awkward. The performers, at first, are a bit of both, acting the lyrics too insistently, with a gesture for every word.Soon, though, they settle down, each delivering a specialty number that recalls (and then lets you put aside) the stellar original cast. Maiesha McQueen, singing Nell Carter’s songs, delivers a heartbreaking “Mean to Me”; Jarvis B. Manning Jr., taking on André De Shields’s track, is especially compelling in “The Viper’s Drag,” a song about smoking weed in which his body seems to become smoke itself. The others — Allison Blackwell, Arnold Harper II and Anastacia McClesky — all have great moments; the seven-person band, led by Kwinton Gray, has nothing but.Back in 1978, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” celebrated songs and performers from an era — the 1920s and ’30s — within many people’s living memory. Now, more than 40 years later, it’s important to replenish the context that time has drained. Even a show so universally admired benefits from thoughtful reconsideration. I don’t mean updating but something more like what happens in this production when we hear Luther Henderson’s stunning arrangement of “Black and Blue,” largely unchanged. It’s then that a deco drop flies up to reveal the back wall of the theater, as if what Waller swung and sang the blues about were happening now. It is.Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Fats Waller Musical ShowThrough July 9 at the Boyd-Quinson Stage, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours. More