Charles Spencer reviews Will Young and Michelle Ryan in the revival of Rufus Norris' Cabaret.
By Charles Spencer - 10 October 2012 • 2:16pm
For some of us there will only ever be one Sally Bowles. If you first saw Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret as an impressionable male adolescent, Liza Minnelli’s sensational performance, with its mixture of sensuality, cheek, vulnerability and vocal power will be etched forever in the memory.
There were of course some who complained that Minnelli was miscast. In Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories, on which Kander and Ebb’s greatest musical is based, Sally Bowles was meant to be a second-rate cabaret performer while Minnelli, in those days at least, was professional to her fingertips.
Six years ago the director Rufus Norris directed a West End production of Cabaret that was more faithful to Isherwood’s original intentions. He cast that fine actress Anna Maxwell Martin as Sally, who proved heart-stoppingly poignant but was indeed a mediocre singer.
Now he has revisited that production. Michelle Ryan, a former star of EastEnders, takes over as Sally Bowles, while the pop star Will Young replaces James Dreyfuss as the unsettling master of ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club.
There are other changes too. Javier de Frutos’s choreography seems less confrontational and sexually unbuttoned than it did the first time around, when the show’s famous decadence often felt more diabolical than divine, and the whole production feels slicker and safer. It will appeal to a wider audience, but something has been lost, too.
Michelle Ryan proves an attractive and unusually wholesome Sally and puts over the big numbers with great assurance. But she never plumbs the emotional depths of the role. There isn’t enough desperate hope in Maybe This Time, and she constantly always comes over as a plucky survivor, rather than someone teetering on the edge of despair.
There is also little sexual chemistry in her relationship with Matt Rawle’s Clifford Bradshaw, the American bisexual writer who falls in love with her. Rawle is excellent in a role that can often seem underwritten, sharply capturing the character’s disgust at the rise of Nazism and his joy when he believes that he and Sally may have a child together. But you never feel that this mismatched couple are unexpectedly head-over-heels in love. Indeed the relationship between the old landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and her Jewish admirer Herr Schultz proves far more touching thanks to lovely autumnal performances from Sian Phillips and Linal Haft.
Will Young, who a few years ago proved a downright embarrassment in Noël Coward’s The Vortex, seems far more at home as the louche Emcee. He has a genuinely disconcerting stage presence with his slicked-down hair, lustful eyes and predatory stillness, and there is a potent mixture of malignity and glee in his performance. As you would expect he sings well too, especially in the initially beautiful Tomorrow Belongs to Me which becomes increasingly sinister as he manipulates the Kit Kat ensemble as if they were puppets on strings, dancing to his tune. The parallel with Hitler and the German population becomes unmistakable.
Norris’s unexpected ending to the show, which it would be a crime to reveal, is even more chilling, and one leaves this patchy but inventive production with a shiver of deep unease.