Flat Kit Kat

By Robert Avila

EVEN BEFORE WE'RE Willkommen'd, bienvenue'd, and welcomed by the spry and shady Emcee (Clive Worsley), the party is in full swing at the Kit Kat Klub – the festive world-within-a-world that epitomizes the final days of Weimar Germany, on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power, in John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret. Shotgun Players' production of the darkly ebullient 1966 musical (with book by Joe Masteroff) goes all out in establishing that seamy ambience, where sexual and political promiscuity make for rich burlesque. At the same time, it more often succeeds with the display than with the substance in Cabaret's knowing spectacle.

Seamlessly blending its realistic love story with a raunchy and satirical floor show, the story line follows an aspiring American novelist, Clifford Bradshaw (Cassidy Brown), who's come to Berlin looking for "something to write about." Lucky for him it's 1931.

Director Russell Blackwood's lovingly detailed staging takes full advantage of the intimate environs of Shotgun's Ashby Stage to envelop the audience in the scene, turning the theater into a bawdy nightclub where the clientele are urged to wine and dine, hoot and shout, and even engage in a little entr'acte mixing on the dance floor with the club's assortment of naughty showgirls, and -boys, decked out in elaborate lingerie (the striking costumes are by Valera Coble).

Although propelled by its zesty chorus line, a rousing house band (music codirected by John Thomas and musician Dave Malloy), Andrea Weber's nimble and dynamic choreography, and capable if rarely exceptional renderings of Kander and Ebb's terrific cycle of songs, Blackwood's production is nevertheless an uneven ride, and in the end surprisingly weak in its ability to disturb and enthrall – surprising because the production reflects considerable insight and artistry in both design and execution.

Heather Basarab's atmospheric set, for example, which features a split-level keyhole entranceway over the Kit Kat's runway stage, shrewdly hints at the play's tension between mass spectacle and political acquiescence. Its open invitation to the curious, prurient eye gazing on the formerly private pleasures on display in Weimer's notorious stages inevitably suggests, too, the invasive eye of a burgeoning police state, itself about to enter onto the stage of history (where it will flex its muscles in an altogether different fashion from the Kit Kat's gartered kittens).

The line from the runway stage further closes the gap between voyeur and accomplice, reaching right into the first tiered rows of the audience on a rising set of tabletops. From this intimate vantage, the German smuggler Ernst (Danny Webber), for instance, can wade into the crowd to lead (pressure) us in a disconcerting chorus of the seductively stirring Nazi anthem "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." Later, after Fraulein Schneider (Mary Gibboney) is pressured into calling off her wedding to the Jewish grocer Herr Schultz (Joe Roebuck), she, too, climbs up into the audience to ask, in a wrenching and haunting solo, "What Would You Do?"

Such moments are gripping and clever elaborations of the play's themes. At the same time, the music's dramatic counterpoint in the plot centered around the offbeat love story of Cliff and the fun-loving English cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Kimberly Dooley) – the play's embodiment of irresponsible yet wonderfully irrepressible freedom – never manages to rise to the same pitch. The dramatic performances tend to be somewhat uneven (Worsley's fierce Emcee and Webber's excellent Ernst are notable exceptions), and moreover there's little chemistry between unlikely lovers Cliff and Sally. Brown's able Cliff, the story's passive participant-observer, is probably a little too reserved. Even before he awakes from the intoxicating dream cast by the Kit Kat's endless party (only to prove an ineffectual hero), we never quite see the allure of the dream – or of Sally, its principal incarnation – through his eyes. Dooley, meanwhile, responds with only flashes of the exuberance associated with her character (though her rendition of the famous title song is a highlight).

If the Kit Kat Klub doesn't always heat up as much as the Emcee promises his costumers it will, Shotgun's Cabaret still has powerfully seductive charms that resonate eerily in this contemporary period of crisis and creeping tyranny. In the tension between escapism and cultural decadence on the one hand, and a rising tide of violent political reaction on the other, it's not easy to tell when the party's over.

'Cabaret' runs through Jan. 15. Thurs.-Sun., 8 p.m. (also Sun/18, 5 p.m.; no shows Dec. 22-25), Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby, Berk. $15-$50. (510) 841-6500, www.shotgunplayers.org.