Stage: Cabaret

Drury Lane Theatre

Chicago

(630) 530-0111

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It’s difficult to make a classic musical like Cabaret seem fresh, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. But despite the odds, director and choreographer Jim Corti’s “eye-popping new revival” achieves a remarkable vitality. John Kander and Fred Ebb’s masterpiece, set at the Kit Kat Klub in Weimar Germany just as the Nazis are beginning their dark ascent, has always titillated and terrified audiences. But Corti, who worked with the film version’s director, Bob Fosse, locates “the sourest of sweet spots between an homage to the show’s splashy Fosse roots and a cleaner, darker sensibility, shorn of cliché and sentimentality." Finding new perspectives on familiar characters, this turns out to be a crisp production that’s “not to be missed.”

A young Chicago actor, Patrick Andrews, plays the sardonic Emcee like a “cross between Charlie Chaplin and Mikhail Baryshnikov,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times, bringing a boyish charm to the character’s otherwise “perverse spirit.” As the self-destructive British singer Sally Bowles, Zarah Mahler gives an “exceptionally compelling” performance that overflows with “fresh phrasing.” On tunes like the flirtatious “Don’t Tell Mama,” her “dusky voice” is particularly effective. Though the show itself is “decidedly racy and adult,” this production ­generates shock value not from the blown-up portrayals of outré sexual behavior, but by making the “looming catastrophe” concrete in the “human treachery” of the characters. “Bravo.”