Review: This is what 'Cabaret' is supposed to be

Now this is what “Cabaret” is supposed to be.

The production that opened Tuesday as part of the Broadway in Cincinnati series at the Aronoff Center is coarse, highly sexualized and politically charged to such an extent that it will surely make some patrons uncomfortable. But then, “Cabaret” is a show for grown-ups. And that’s fine.

“Cabaret” has been subjected to many different approaches since it premiered on Broadway in 1966. Some have been extraordinary. But often, directors – and their marketing advisors – have chosen to soften the material. After all, with music so memorable, why get bogged down with things like anti-Semitism, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust that all of us in the audience know is coming?

In 1998, though, film director Sam Mendes and choreographer/co-director Rob Marshall brought a “Cabaret” to Broadway that, for many viewers, revealed what the show should have been all along. This is that production.

All of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s memorable musical numbers are still there; “Willkommen,” “Maybe This Time,” “If You Could See Her,” “What Would You Do” and, of course, the title song, “Cabaret.” Joe Masteroff’s masterful script is there, too, right down to the opening lines of a novel-to-be by Cliff Bradshaw, the aspiring American novelist who sets the story into motion.

“There was a cabaret and there was a master of ceremonies and there was a city called Berlin in a country called Germany. It was the end of the world.”

There’s more to the line. But these few lines, coming just before the show’s finale, pretty well sum it up.

The first act is a burst of theatricality as glorious as it is outrageous. It’s a nonstop party in the Kit Kat Klub, where the effervescent Sally Bowles – a ferociously waifish Andrea Goss – holds court and where Cliff (Lee Aaron Rosen) falls in love with her. Or maybe he’s falling in love with that handsome young chorus boy Bobby (Leeds Hill), whose promises of naughtiness may turn out to be more exciting than Sally’s.

At the center of it all is the Emcee (Randy Harrison); playful, seductive and wonderfully vulgar, Harrison is the personification of all the dangerous appeal of the forbidden culture of a world that is slowly imploding.

When he sings “I am your host,” he’s not just talking about showing you to your table. Whatever form of sexual gratification you may be searching for, whatever long-held fantasy you may hope to realize, he will find it for you. And perhaps even join in.

Before the end of the first act, though, the darkness begins to descend over the Kit Kat Klub and the rest of Germany. The characters who populate “Cabaret” have no way of knowing it, but their carefree times are about to end.

This is one of the most uniformly excellent casts we’ve seen from a Broadway in Cincinnati show this season. Harrison is wickedly charming, an unctuous and provocative chameleon of a character that we can’t take our eyes off.

There are no real good guys in this show. All of the characters – and, presumably, all of us in the audience, too – are flawed. Some, like Sally, more than others. Goss portrays her as barely hanging on, a woman so drawn to the flame of life that, like Icarus, she can’t bear to save herself from it. And for all his fresh-scrubbed niceness, there is no question that Rosen’s Cliff is ready to be led into the dark side’s darkest recesses.

There are other fine performances, too; Ned Noyes as the too-willing acquaintance who guides Cliff to the Kit Kat Klub, Shannon Cochran as the tragically practical Fraulein Schneider and Mark Nelson as Herr Schultz, the closest “Cabaret” has to an innocent character.

Just as much of the show’s success stems from the Kit Kat Girls and Boys and their tawdry, wildly suggestive dancing and singing. At the beginning of “Money,” the Emcee struts around, swaying his hips and humiliating the Kit Kat Girls, who crawl around on the floor wearing scanty undergarments, willing to do anything for the money he tosses their way. It’s like one of those nightmarish visions of hell in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

But it’s not Bosch. It’s Germany in 1930. And it’s not hell. Not yet.

“Cabaret” continues through May 22 at the Aronoff Center.

Email davidlyman@gmail.com.