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| Review: All community theater should be daring as this 'Cabaret' | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| November 6, 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Or the emcee, his pale face wrenched in pain, his hands strung up with rope, a body about to be tortured. One of his ensemble dancers, you see, has staged a Nazi-sympathizing coup within Berlin’s gritty Kit Kat Klub — and a night of sexy, escapist entertainment has gone horribly awry. Willkommen, if you will, to “Cabaret” — the darkly delicious Kander and Ebb musical that kicks off Mesa Encore Theatre’s season — in a staging that’s been twisted, tweaked and turned on its head. Whether that’s good or bad largely depends on your allegiance to the source material; 25-year-old director Phillip Fazio has ditched much of the original stage direction and attempted his own unique stamp, for ill or not — making this a prime example of a classic colliding headfirst with the sampling-and-remixing generation. Sure, it’s a bit heretical. And some of Fazio’s choices seem more for the sake of doing something different than making sense or producing good theater. But this “Cabaret” is engaging, provocative and makes for the kind of risk-taking art that one wishes more community theaters attempted these days. About the only traditional thing in this “Cabaret” is its gamin heroine Sally Bowles, played by Sarah Wolter, a 25-year-old whose second-rate chanteuse (more Holly Golightly than Liza Minnelli, outfitted in more fishnet than the boat of the Gorton’s fisherman) comes with first-rate pipes, belting “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Herr” with irresistible brio. Around her, Weimar-era Berlin is crumbling, love blooms only to be doomed and — in Fazio’s version — a nightclub’s master of ceremonies (played by Jason Powell, 26), wearing a jester’s wicked grin and tuxedo sans shirt, decides that what everyone needs is one last Bacchanalia before the end of the world. The party hits a snag, as they tend to do, when one of his dancers (played by Billy Irwin) starts throwing one-arm Nazi salutes around and the emcee is, in a sense, overthrown. For a character usually imbued with varying degrees of knowing complicity and winking irony, this much vulnerability and naivete is a strange and interesting twist. For all the changes, Fazio’s “Cabaret” is a pretty solid community theater effort. The choreography, courtesy of Fazio and Misha Faucher, falls a little on the raunchier side (I stopped counting the number of playful spankings after the first dozen), but is executed with sassy spirit by the ensemble. And actors Barbara McBain and Kurt Whitman, playing two generations of lovers whose hearts are crushed under the pressures of the era, perfectly realize their parts. Whether shows like this succeed is almost beside the point; I wish more community theaters occasionally handed over the reins to younger directors with bold and challenging visions. This “Cabaret” could only have been made by a 20-something — searching for new meanings, stretching for new metaphor. And that’s a wonderful thing. 'Cabaret’ When: 7 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, closing Nov. 11 Where: Mesa Arts Center, 1 E. Main St. Cost: $20-$25 Information: (480) 644-6500 or www.mesaartscenter.com Grade: B Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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