CAST's 'Cabaret' outstanding
By Ruby Nancy

Despite it being one of their earliest collaborations, John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s “Cabaret” is a musical theater classic.

The story of intertwined lives during the last days of pre-Nazi Berlin, this musical mixes straightforward here’s-what-I’m-feeling character numbers with more presentational songs that function as jaded commentary, resulting in a juxtaposition that is deliberately jarring. Immensely rich material with a host of great songs, the show is too complex an undertaking for many theater companies.

The Clinton Area Showboat Theatre’s production of “Cabaret,” however, is proof that it can be done — and well — even without the huge budgets that have accompanied the show’s original New York incarnation and its revivals, the latest of which is still going strong after eight years. The CAST version, complete with a “beautiful” orchestra, makes excellent use of the small stage – delivering songs with an intensity and intimacy that is almost impossible to replicate in a larger space.

Guest director Mark Liermann and musical director Allison Hendrix have put together an excellent show, with choreography by Jay Berkow, who also stars as the Emcee. Richly costumed and totally decadent, the actual cabaret that figures so strongly in the show is created almost entirely by the characters in it — including dancers who wear an assorted parade of lingerie and dark eye makeup that seems to grow more ghoulish as the story goes on.

At the center of it all is Berkow’s Emcee, whose white-paint makeup is pretty scary from the beginning. Leading or performing almost every Kit Kat Klub number, Berkow speaks and sings with a thick (though not always German) accent, and his work is so simply stunning, so completely engrossing that you forget this minor detail, getting caught up in this story. He really shines on both the light-hearted “Two Ladies” and the grossly comic “If You Could See Her” — and is great in all the other numbers he sings — but his silent observation of many other scenes and his ever more debauched appearance are totally compelling. His mere presence and absorb-it-all gaze are the stuff of a terrific performance, and when he throws in his Kit Kat patter, things just get more interesting.

Hendrix — who has wowed us all summer with her first-class talent as a dancer, singer and actor – makes her work as music director count, resulting in topnotch work from singers and musicians alike. She conducts and plays the piano, too, which is no mean feat in a show with music like this, and every single song at the performance I saw was wonderfully done.

Cassandra Marie Nuss stars as Sally Bowles, the terribly unhappy, super-talented English expat who enthralls American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Benjamin Cole) and the audience with equal ease. Nuss infuses Sally with emotional intensity and a passionate desperation that is incredibly moving, and her five-star performance is the show’s most outstanding asset. She nails the title song – from its hesitant, sorrowful beginning to the decisive, heartbreakingly powerful final chorus — with such awesome, pain-suffused gloriousness that even trying to write about it has literally moved me to tears (a profoundly rare occurrence that deserves the honest mention). It’s impossible to completely describe just how great Nuss is in this role, but it has been a privilege to try.

A host of other performers turn in superb work as principals and ensemble members, too. Nicole Horton’s disheveled, yet striking Fraulein Kost has more impact than is expected from the role, Colin Douglas and Jalayne Riewerts are fantastic and sweet as the grocer and landlady who find love late in life, and Cole’s off-hand Clifford is surprisingly successful in engaging us in his point of view.

Additionally, Paul Luoma’s vocals on “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” are clear and haunting, practically unforgettable, and the way Liermann ends Act I is both heartbreakingly real and quite frightening. Like so many choices made by the performers and the talent helming this show, it is perfectly done.

This “Cabaret” is intense, amazing, absolutely engrossing – and a reminder of how easily hate and fear can come to power, endangering the lives of countless thousands.