Portland Center Stage (PCS) kicks off their second season in the
Armory with a darker, more complex musical than the perennially
crowd-pleasing West Side Story, which started off last year’s
season. Cabaret is set in Germany during the years of Hitler’s
rise to power, and addresses the complicity of ordinary citizens in
allowing the Nazi Party to ascend unchecked.
Clifford Bradshaw (Romain Frugé) is an American writer who
has come to Berlin to work on his novel. He shortly winds up in a
relationship with Sally Bowles (Storm Large), an ebullient but
irresponsible performer at Berlin’s hottest cabaret, the Kit Kat
Klub.
The question in everybody’s mind is: How does Storm Large handle the
role of Sally Bowles? She does just fine, shining particularly and
unsurprisingly in the cabaret scenes—nobody informs skankiness
with intelligence like Storm does.
Wade McCollum stands out here as well; he’s fiercely, creepily
compelling in his role as the sexually ambidextrous emcee. Much of the
rest of the acting, though, has the unmistakable flatness of
professional actors just doing their jobs. Frugé is particularly
miscast (or misdirected) as Cliff, rendering his character
two-dimensional, too earnest, and dull.
The show is technically superb, with moody, diffuse lighting and a
rotating set based on the design of a turntable.
Maybe it’s willfully naïve to call any aspect of a musical
“heavy handed,” but moments of Cabaret are so dumb that they
border on offensive. The breakdown scene of the “Finale,” in which the
decadence of the Kit Kat Klub tips finally into decay, brings to mind
less the death throes of a creative and licentious subculture, than it
does the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.
This is not to say that Cabaret isn’t a crowd pleaser.
There’s enough spectacle in Cabaret, particularly the musical
numbers, to make it fun to watch—but for a show with so much
potential relevance to contemporary audiences, and so many resources
behind it, it should have been better.