Please Remain Sitting Alone In Your Room!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                       Really, that is the best recommendation I can give, after seeing this current production of "Cabaret."  A better time would be had sitting in one's room playing one's Broadway show or opera collection, reading the latest novel one is perusing, or watching true crime.  What has been done to "Cabaret" is a crime in itself, so let us start there.

                                        "Cabaret" is not just "Cabaret" anymore.  It is now "Cabaret At The Kit Kat Club."  Maybe that should be "Clit Kat Club," because lesbians are flocking to director Rebecca Frecknall's tragically distorted vision of this show.

                                             The action starts even before the show.  Audiences enter by way of the stage door alley, into a maze of darkness, where they are handed a glass of schnapps I could not drink, and almost menaced by garishly, horrifically costumed actors dressed as sex workers, suggesting the atmosphere of a sex club.  Only, guys, there are no glory holes, so sorry.  But really, once the show starts the actors and actresses are so scantily clad down there one can kooch and then some.  And all the male dancers seem hard all the time.  In my brief and merry life on the stage, I cannot recall ever being aroused from it.

                                                Things don't stop there.  Musical numbers have been shifted out of place, making no sense--when Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles sings "Maybe This Time," it comes far too early," while the chilling "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" is handled as overstatedly as possible.  There is nothing understated about this "Cabaret," and that is the problem.  If I had been in this depiction of Berlin, myself, I would have had the sense to get the hell out of there, fast.

                                                     Nevertheless, the Kander and Ebb score still shines, Gayle Rankin is good as Sally, doing a rousing "Don't Tell Mama," but missing the mark with the iconic title song, which is sung like a woman having a nervous breakdown.  Why?  What is the point?

                                                       As for the staging, by director Frecknall and Julia Cheng's choreography, the same questions may be asked.  Most of the action takes place on three circular platforms, rising in the air to resemble a wedding cake.  At one point in Act Two, little, tiny mannequins are circling the platform, in their places.  This foreshadows how the creators envision the Holocaust, which ends the show with all the principles atop the wedding cake, facing forward catatonically, dressed in brown.  Oh, my.  The Holocaust was about mass conformity?  Are you kidding me?  Sure, but it was a hell of a lot more than that.  To reduce it to this level is to trivialize the entire piece, insulting both the Holocaust and the show.

                                                      Only two things save this "Cabaret" from becoming a disappointing evening, and those are the heartrending performances of Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell as Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, whose heartbreaking story is the center of the show.  Their interactions and heartbreak are so palpably felt by the audience--the only time they are allowed to feel anything--and Neuwirth's rendition of "What Would You Do?" makes those of us of a certain age think and delivers the song's emotional power in a way that makes the show worth seeing for this alone.

                                                        Which brings up another point.  There is a schism between the cabaret performers and these two.  Each group seems to be doing a different show.  I am going with the one Neuwirth and Skybell do.  When will theater practitioners relearn the value of understatement?

                                                             I may be going like Elsie, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this "Cabaret."  Stick with "the knitting, the book, and the broom."