January 19, 2023
Broadway's Flying Over Sunset: Highs & Lows of Getting Super Duper Highby Randi / January 6, 2022It’s Theatre Thursday! I lost track of days again! What is time! Today’s show is the new production of Cabaret at London’s Playhouse Theatre, which marketing and publicity says has been renamed The Kit Kat Club, but unless that name lasts beyond this production it doesn’t really count. You know the Playhouse, it’s the one just past the Enbankment arches where there’s a Subway I actually ate at once.
London’s latest version of Cabaret is the hottest ticket in town, and with dern good reason. With Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, the star power is out the wazoo and ticket prices have reflected that. It’s the most expensive show the West End has seen in a while, with little way around it. And while it is indeed a wonderful production with some great performances, it is not as life-changing or once-in-a-generation or sell-your-soul-to-see-this as some critics have fallen over themselves to proclaim. If you’ve seen a strong production of Cabaret in your life (which is likely, considering how prolific productions have been for so many decades and how strong the bones of the show are to lend itself to strong productions even without this star power), this one won’t be much different, so do not sell your soul. If you do have a ticket though, well, splendid.
Cabaret, as you know, tells the story of Sally Bowles, an unsteady but effervescent English cabaret performer in a seedy Berlin nightclub just as the Nazis rise to power. Threaded through the story of Sally and her new American writer beau and the world they’re in are scenes from the cabaret, led by an unsettling-sexy-scary-phantasm type jawn whose scenes when well-directed (which they are here) can Mean More than They Seem.
Although no one is talking about it, I was extra curious/anxious to see this show again after the recent controversy over Rare Earth Mettle, Jewish casting, and general treatment of Jewishness in London theatre. Cabaret was written by Jews and is literally about Nazis taking over and German Jews getting a glimpse of what’s to come, but some productions feel like they are taking that into account more than others in a certain ineffable way. The last Broadway revival had a vibe running through it like it acknowledged it was by and somewhat about Jews, even though it’s About an English gentile girl. This one does not, although the performance of Schultz (Elliot Levey) is very good. I think this comes back down to the difference between theatre in New York vs. London which I’ve written about a lot and don’t feel like doing today.
There are three big selling points of this production: First, the theatre itself. Yes, it has been transformed from the minute you walk in the door, which is about 20 minutes later than you thought you would because it takes motherforking forever to be let in. This is because, fortunately, staff is checking for negative LFTs (and haven’t even half the swiftness of Broadway staffers in checking patron by patron) and also, unfortunately, they are clearly slowing down the inflow of people because it’s super crowded inside, and also, fortunately, everyone who enters gets a free drink from one single bartender per route of entry (just like who designed this system guys) (oh you get either a beer, a tiny thimble of Schnapps, or a bottle of water. pretty cool). The frustration of waiting out in the cold for so long despite your ticketed ‘entry time’ being 39 minutes ago quickly fades when you enter the completely reimagined space, which has shadowy figures hither and yon playing instruments, ‘dancing’, and generally creating the vibe of a seedy old German club, I mean, I’m guessing. While it’s fun to look around and become immersed in the experience before the show begins, I’m not a huuuge fan of seedy underground clubs, or clubs in general, and I’m really not a fan of milling about with hundos of unmasked jackwagons. So, while it was cool, this whole shibang wasn’t as mind-blowingly amaaaz as everyone says. That’s just me that’s just me; everyone else was totally oohing and ahhing at the scantily clad writhers scattered about.
More importantly: the second and third selling points of this show, the two stars. Eddie Redmayne is as good as they say. He’s doing this weird hunchback-of-Notre-Dame meets sickly-Victorian-boy meets haunted-marionette thing that really works for the Emcee. His approach was different enough from the legendary Alan Cumming performance I feel like I just saw on Broadway, so there weren’t many reasons to compare the two, I think fortunately. Cumming does have that unabashed unhindered and almost uncomfortably high awareness of sexuality though, like oozing out his pores, and Eddie does not, so that makes the sessual bits (like “Two Ladies”) feel a bit awks, a bit mismatched. But he sounds great and he’s so fully committed to this pretty insane role.
The real star for me is Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. At first I was left a little wanting when her opening number, “Don’t Tell Mama”, was more spoken than sung, which is a peeve of mine, but with every minute she keeps leveling up. Her first scene with Cliff, with all the Britishisms about what ‘one does’ and all was pitch perfect and reached new levels of hilarity that I never really got before. Her instability and her sense of self are clear without being annoying. She keeps building this character and its anxieties and fears throughout the show so that her final swansong of “Cabaret” was shockingly strong and completely untethered. Husbo thought it was a little too unhinged, but I loved it. Buckley wholly nails that vibe of Sally being a manic pixie girl but in a nightmare instead of a dream. She is wonderful.
The supporting cast is strong too, with the side plot between Fraulein Schneider (Liza Sadovy) and Herr Schultz carrying the day, in large part due to the power of Sadovy’s numbers. I like Omari Douglas but felt he was miscast as Cliff here, perhaps because he was the one onstage I could tell was capital-A Acting. But my criticisms are small, really. This production is so well directed that there are still parts that are creeping up on me, like how Eddie is dressed up as a Halloween-ish depiction of death conducting the cast during the Act I closer ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’, get it, because it did? you get it. It’s always interesting to see how they can make yet another production of this oft-performed classic feel warranted, and this one was. More than anything though, it cemented that these two stars are motherforking Stars that I hope continue in theatre for a long time.
INFORMATION
Strongly recommend sitting up the dress circle. It’s cheaper (somewhat) and easier to get to the bathrooms. The first act is LONG, like an hour 40? The second is an hour.
No one wears masks because they are drinking the whole time. The assholes next to us had bottles of wine and whenever they would refill their glasses, they would cheers and clink their glasses. We were close to screaming but they always chose their moments to prevent this, like doing it at the emotional climax of ‘Maybe This Time’. I FORKING HATE YOU. A lot of people in the cabaret tables up front were obviously there to be seen, in a pathetic but unavoidable in the social media age way. There was this girl sitting right in front in like a silver and white Sexy Baby costume who was gasping and clutching her throat the whole time in wonderment so fake and performative, it was plainly a 2 1/2 hour audition for her. I hope she gets the attention she so badly craves. Anyway what I’m saying is it was a bad audience but WHATEVER.
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Audra McDonald in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill”: A Once In A Lifetime Performance
The minute the unmatched Audra McDonald opens her mouth onstage, you are transported back 50 years. You’re no longer watching the greatest living musical talent of our time but the great pioneering musician of the past, Billie Holiday. You’re in Emerson’s Bar & Grill, one of Billie’s favorite places to perform in Philadelphia, recreated on Broadway in an intimate space in the Circle in the Square theatre. And everyone around is gasping.
This isn’t an imitation happening onstage, but a full transformation and embodiment of Lady Day, from the mannerisms to the stance to the way she moves her eyes. It’s magic happening in front of you as Audra channels Billie Holiday. Seriously, everyone was gasping and pretty much didn’t stop (at least the people next to me didn’t stop, despite my repeatedly throwing shade).
This isn’t an imitation happening onstage, but a full transformation and embodiment of Lady Day, from the mannerisms to the stance to the way she moves her eyes. It’s magic happening in front of you as Audra channels Billie Holiday. Seriously, everyone was gasping and pretty much didn’t stop (at least the people next to me didn’t stop, despite my repeatedly throwing shade).
Holy bald head Batman
If you’re a fan of Holiday (“Do you like Billie Holiday?” “I love him”), this show will astound you and leave you breathless. But even if you are unfamiliar with her wonderful catalogue (including such gems as “What A Little Moonlight Can Do”, “When A Woman Loves A Man”, “Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness”, and of course the unmatched and haunting “God Bless The Child” and “Strange Fruit”, all of which are performed to perfection here), you will leave the show wanting to become a Billie Holiday fan.
In between the many songs, which are so astonishing it’s like you could say you actually saw Billie Holiday in concert, Audra tells her concert audience (“my friends”, she calls us) little stories that illustrate her life. This is where the real magic happens, and this is where Audra wins her sixth Tony. Some stories are hilarious yet they all express the untold heartache she has had to experience. She speaks and stumbles and falls and it’s Billie Holiday. She drinks, smokes, walks through the table seating, wanders offstage for several minutes to retrieve her dog, who’s her best friend. She holds back tears, and the audience does too. It’s all Billie.
The stories she tells come up organically between songs and are perfect glimpses into Billie’s turbulent life. She looks back at her backup musicians and drifts off in thought about her old love, a musician who was a drug addict (she says “herwan” and it’s adorable). She tells how the man would say to her, “If you really loved me you’d try it too,” and despite her protests, he kept at it, making her feel unnecessarily guilty and terrible until she couldn’t argue anymore. Her stories are full of people she thought she loved weakening her and manipulating her until they hurt her and took advantage of her. Yet she was still strong. And despite Audra’s hunched posture, wild eyes, and frightening imbalance, she successfully conveyed this inner strength.
The stories about her mother were the most heartbreaking parts. Everyone called her tiny mother “The Duchess”, and Billie makes lots of jokes about how little the Duchess was and how big she herself was. The Duchess had Billie as a very young teenager and put her to work early in various kinds of houses they stayed in. Billie recounts ‘the first time’ she was raped as a young child in one of these houses, told in a tone so casual it showed how accustomed to trauma and tragedy she had become.
One of the most repeated thoughts she shares is that she always wanted a nice house and children, and how much she loved children. She never had any, or had any stability in her life. The beauty of the performance helps to balance just how sad everything is. It’s really a fool’s errand to try to describe how wonderful this show is. If you can get to New York before it closes in August, you absolutely must see this performance of a lifetime. If you can’t, watch the clip below. (Don’t watch it if there’s any chance you can see the show. You don’t want to be spoiled.)
And if somehow you’ve lived under a rock until today and you have never heard the magic that is Audra McDonald’s singing and you think the “Lady Day” producers just found a woman who sounded like Billie Holiday, here’s a video of her actual voice.
Helen Hunt is Great, Appropriately Infuriating in Old Vic’s Eureka Day
For a play that I went into fully expecting to give me terrible agita and have me tearing my hair out and grimacing like Jim Carrey when he’s kicking his own ass, do you mind?!, Eureka Day exceeded my expectations. All we knew going in was that it was about anti-vaxxers and ‘woke liberals’ &c so, yeah, AGITA COMES A CALLING. More importantly, that Helen Hunt was coming over to foggy London town to star in it, so we had to go. Helen Hunt baby! Did Mad About You even air here? Luckily, Eureka Day, by Jonathan Spector, was well done and well presented so I only had a little agita. We also unexpectedly cried laughing at certain parts, so overall I am as pro this play as I am pro vaccines.
Eureka Day is the name of a Berkeley private school (seemed elementary age, poss preschool, poss pre-to-teen even, gotta control them throughout the formative years!), so if you aren’t told anything else, you know this school’s gonna be heavily hawite, grossly wealthy, largely NIMBYers who act green (with their reusable totes and appropriately colored juices) but deep down are red (not just for tax breaks but also because they hate minorities (it’s true! they do!)). These are the kind of parents who think they are anti-racist but end up being super duper racist, who berate you for using plastic but vote for people who are destroying the planet. Or hey maybe they do vote properly, but they still hate all minorities! (it’s true! they do). We meet the board, made of 5-6 parents including the guy who seems kind of like the principal and definitely one who is like ‘remember the last three letters of that word spell P-A-L!’ Helen Hunt (I’m just gonna call her Helen okay), it becomes clear, has been part of this board since the beginning of this school, like for decades, possibly having kids just so she can keep being eligible. You have the father drinking his green juice out of a reusable bottle (the level of character detail! spot on), the mother with the sweet voice and the Thailand pants (you know the ones) (okay it might have just been ashram chic but I immediately thought Thailand pants), and then you have the newest member, a black woman (Susan Kelechi Watson), so you’re like OH. OH OKAY, let’s see how this goes.
We get dropped right into the messy topics these jamokes are gonna try to figure out: their first order of business is choosing the drop-down menu of ethnicities for future applicants. Coming in hot! Remember how I have said since I was a baby that every London show has an awkward Jewish moment? This one came right off the bat, so that was helpful. During the oh-so-well-meaning conversation, one of the parents reminds everyone of the time a Jewish parent said they weren’t comfortable choosing ‘white’ (valid! especially in Berkeley! they hate Jews and other them!), and another said “that’s not what this is about”. I loved the little subtle attention to detail that this crowd would indeed spend hours deciding whether ‘transracial adoptive family’ was something they needed to include but immediately dismiss the very complicated question of white-passing Jewish ethnicity (of course they didn’t entertain the idea of non-white Jews). I was just like, yep this is all very realistic, though I wonder how much of it was on purpose, and if anyone else understood the nuance or just laughed at the word “jew” as they always do in this city (they did! they always do!). Just like, what an introduction to what this group was gonna be like! That super white liberal kind of subtle racism, it’s so accurate.
The characterization continues to be strong throughout. It becomes clear that the juicing father and the sweet other woman are having an affair — but then in true Berkeley fashion, the tables turn on us, and it turns out they aren’t actually sneaking around because his wife knows and has consented to opening the relationship. My god it’s spot on. My other favorite little subtle detail is when Helen at one point says ‘When they go low, we go high, right?’ quoting Michelle Obama and makes the tiniest little ‘you get me!’ gesture to Kelechi Watson. IT IS SO ACCURATE. All the actors are so good, so attuned to their characters.
We get to the meat of the show after a mumps outbreak forces the school to close. I know what you are thinking if you are old enough to read: mumps? Didn’t we solve that with vaccines like when I was an infant? It’s back, baby! Just like in real life because people are insane and easily taken advantage of by monsters who just want money, power, and I guess to watch the world burn, only about half the kids in Eureka Day are vaxxed. As one of the few clear-headed parents says in the chat on the subsequent school-wide Zoom call, “WAIT HALF THE SCHOOL ARE ANTI-VAXXERS???”
Guys, this Zoom call, it is a thing of pure theatrical, comedic beauty. I cannot get over it. There’s no way I can spoil it either even if I share all the funniest parts, because it’s like a 20 minute long funniest part, all of it. While the board talks, the show projects the chat box onto the back wall, and honestly no one in that theatre could tell you anything the board was saying, because all you heard was laughter as the chat scrolled. (I’m pretty sure that’s the point and you aren’t supposed to be listening to the board.) It is SPOT ON. The kinds of commenters, the vibes, the one parent who sends the same emoji in response to everything; the people asking if anyone else can hear anything, the others trying to help them navigate the controls; the people asking questions that the board will clearly be answering if you give them a minute, the people responding ‘I think they’re getting to that’. The accuracy of this call falling to shit, it’s hilarious. We’ve all seen these comments before. But when we get to the specifics of this call, man oh man. The parents suggesting giving your child ginger and raisin instead of ibuprofen (f-ing Berkeley) because ‘we don’t want to poison our kids’, the response ‘oh but letting them die of preventable disease is okay!’ The suggestion to visit a chiropractor, followed by the smart person saying that chiros are largely quacks, followed by “actually chiropractors have more hours studying anatomy than doctors” followed by “well my dog has more hours smelling shit than doctors but that doesn’t make him a proctologist.” IT WAS AMAZING. On and on it went, anti-vaxxers vs. sane people, all-capsing in the comments as the board absolutely loses control. It was so cathartic, and poss one of my favorite theatre moments in a long time.
The discussion challenges the board, since they don’t do anything without consensus, which in itself is an interesting point because how is that every possible. Decisions like this are all about how the choices are framed – is it protecting kids or endangering them? Is it about giving families freedom to decide for themselves or taking their decision-making abilities away from them and controlling their parenting? As the board decides what to do, whether to change the flexible vax policy to protect the kids, or to protect FREEDOM, you learn more about why certain people, namely Helen’s character, would be anti-vax (oh yeah she’s one). In doing so, the show provides a good balance of compassion for both sides, without giving credence to the idea that facts and science have two sides. There’s just one side! That’s what makes it science! But giving some backstory, some really heartbreaking backstory, helps this play accomplish the difficult task of having this conversation in the first place without it just being that (gorgeous) Zoom call. And it is difficult, all of it, knowing whether we are supposed to believe Helen or realize that we can have empathy for her without necessarily taking her words at face value; grappling with having empathy for someone whose decisions could literally kill people…it’s all layered and hard.
I read the reviews and your British reviewers were very much ‘it didn’t work for me given the British schooling system’ (what even is that b.s.) and ‘it seemed to let liberals off the hook’ and ‘I keep spelling it *Berkley* even though I have I a whole range of editors and fact-checkers at this professional publication’ but I think this play does a great job showing how we’ve gotten to this point, how complicated it all is, how important not to let the complications and the difficulties blind you to the truths (something about the forest for the trees) and how we can try dealing with it without only using all-caps yelling. Though you know I love all-caps yelling. Especially at anti-vaxxers.
INFORMATION
Eureka Day runs at the Old Vic until Oct 31 (WE ARE NOT TAWKING ABOUT HALLOWEEN). The first act is like 40-45 minutes? (a dream) The second is just over an hour. All the way upstairs at the Old Vic continues to be the best value and have the emptiest bathrooms!
