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Palminder Kaur reviews Cabaret at the Bristol Hippodrome

This iconic Kander & Ebb musical follows Christopher Isherwood’s story of good time girl Sally Bowles as she navigates early Thirties Berlin - 'the Babylon of the world’.

At the start of the show, Siobhan Dillon’s Sally and Henry Luxemburg’s Cliff Bradshaw are both immediately unlikeable. Cliff is self centred, self important and humourless. Sally is self-centred, self important and ruthless.

They both warm up when they become more vulnerable and more appealing, dueting the wonderful Perfectly Marvellous. The real emotion and tragedy come from the much less glamorous pairing of elderly Herr Schultz and the widowed landlady Fraulien Scheider. Their gradual romance is moving and beautifully sung.

This Berlin moves from a high kicking, champagne slurping and free loving party animal to a creature cowering from the prowling menace of young men decorated with swastikas in steel toe-capped boots. It seems a flaw in the production that the excitement of the pre-Nazi knees up seems forced and painted onto the faces of pretty young things dancing for money. It lends the production an all consuming gloominess – its starting point is prostitution, desperation and poverty and then along come the Nazis to cheer things up.

It is in this darkness and the simplicity with which it is manipulated that Cabaret is most effective. A sparse stage and broken glass are the quiet backdrop to heartbreak and betrayal, a red light and the hiss of gas the only accompaniment to still forms as the show closes.

There are good times – tender romance, bawdy humour and plenty to get your feet tapping with numbers like Cabaret and Don’t Tell Mama. But then there is Dillon, who is so exquisite and has such an extraordinary voice it seems utter nonsense that her character would be the victim of a string of both sexual and professional rejections by Bradshaw and Wayne Sleep’s scene-stealing Emcee.

Having recently seen Kander & Ebb’s Chicago I was expecting this to have a similar tone. Cabaret is a much more troubling story with a surprising depth, perhaps made more profound by our awareness of what does happen to Berlin after the curtain falls.

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