Evvy Calstrom-March (center, as Sally Bowles) and Stephen Kanaski (also center, as the Emcee) star in Cabaret. (All photos by Katie Wickes)
By WOODY WEINGARTEN
There’s no perfect show, no perfect production. But the Marin Musical Theatre Company’s interpretation of Cabaret comes within a hair’s breadth of reaching those pinnacles.
The best Bay Area theatrical work of the year, perhaps the season, it stars Evvy Calstrom-March as chanteuse Sally Bowles, the main draw in Berlin’s shabby Kit Kat Club, circa the Roaring Twenties and the rise of Hitler.
Calstrom-March is a joy to watch every second she’s on stage at the Novato Theatre Company (which presented Cabaret). She’s a quadruple threat: vocals that might make many a Broadway starlet jealous; dancing that puts a capital “L” in limber; dramatic acting chops that make you feel with her; and a rubberized face that can deliver comic expressions with ease.
Also completely watchable is Stephen Kanaski, the Emcee, who changes costumes as often as kids check out their smart phones, and who leers and sneers with the best of them — even though actor/singer Joel Grey originally “owned” the role.
Choreography by Katie Wickes — who also seamlessly co-directed the show with Jenny Boynton — derivatively reminds theatergoers of Bob Fosse at his peak with an underlay of classic Jerome Robbins (and that’s not a bad thing). She staged and rehearsed each of the four nightclub dancers so well they seemed to fill the spotlights as if there were two or three times that many hoofers.
Superlative costumes by Krista Lee and Andria Nyland ranged from a military uniform to glitzy, skimpy burlesque outfits to “ordinary clothing” that blended so well it became invisible so they didn’t distract from the plotline.
A trio of instrumentalists, led by music director Daniel Savio just off the stage, doesn’t miss a proverbial beat and couldn’t have supported the cast better with its bouncy jazz rhythms suitable to the era.
Others worth lauding include Daniela Innocenti Beem, who smoothly injects landlady Fraulein Schneider (who feels pressured by the political upheaval to not marry the Jewish fruit peddler she loves) with humor and pathos and a voice that won’t quit, and Michael Lister, who portrays Ernst, a Nazi smuggler, with appropriate sleaze.
Cabaret, as most theatergoers know, is a rough-edged tragic double-love story engraved on a backdrop of Nazism. Today, the 1966 musical again acts as a red-flag metaphor suggesting that extreme nationalism, racism, Antisemitism, anti-LGBTQ+ism, and blindness to burgeoning authoritarianism can imperil our frail democracy.
Fräulein Schneider (Daniela Innocenti Beem), a landlady, cozies up to Jewish fruit peddler, Herr Shultz (Jere Torkelsen).
The Marin Musical Theatre Company (MMTC) show isn’t for everyone, certainly — despite the production’s overall superb quality and the show’s Tony award-winning history. MAGA devotees probably won’t like it just because. And anyone who can’t handle its cornucopia of heavy sexuality, debauchery, homophobia, immorality, hedonism, prostitution, and drugs most likely will stay home.
Sally Bowles (Evvy Calstrom-March, center) and Kit Kat Club girls come on strong.
Regardless, classic Broadway music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, a team that also spawned another Great White Way blockbuster, Chicago, remain a perfect fit. Several of the tunes, in fact, can be sung or hummed or whistled as you leave the theater, an endeavor that’s almost as dead as the proverbial dodo if you think about more modern musicals.
Joel Grey, not incidentally, gets cited online by Wickes and Boynton, in lieu of a production prologue, by reprinting an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times last November.
In it, he sounds an alarm about “the dangers of apathy” and distraction — as he simultaneously warns us about being seduced by a sense that we are facing dark times but “they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives.”
That sense, he notes, echoes “the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ‘30s.”
The MMTC/Novato Theatre Company co-production of Cabaret will play at the Novato Theatre Company, 5420 Nave Drive, Novato, through April 13. Tickets: $35 to $50. Info: 415-883-4498 or info@marinmusicals.org.
Sherwood “Woody” Weingarten, a longtime member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle and the author of four books, can be contacted by email at voodee@sbcglobal.net or on his websites, https://woodyweingarten.com and https://vitalitypress.com.
