Stockton Civic Theater’s Cabaret Kicks Up More Than a Chorus Line in Old Berlin

The sun is setting on the civilized order of Europe, but the lights are still bright (for the time being) at Berlin’s Kit Kat Club, where refugees from Germany’s impending darkness can find relief in an anything-goes musical circus hosted by a naughty and prankish emcee who welcomes visitors to his idea of the beautiful life.

 

Welcome to the Stockton Civic Theatre version of “Cabaret”. It’s a musical with a capital M given its lasting fame and a second M to caution you that the show is intended for mature audiences. Leave the kids at home and try to show some maturity as you hoot and holler at the show’s terrific singing and dancing. 

 

The longtime stage hit (currently being revived on Broadway) and the 1972 film classic that won 8 Oscars (including those for Liza Minelli as Sally, Joel Grey as the Emcee and director Bob Fosse) is given a spirited new rendering here. It’s bawdy and boisterous, graced with memorable acting, humorously indecent, and capped with a surprise ending that may strike you as having relevance to today’s troubled world. What more can one ask?

 

Hemingway might have thrived in a plot that follows the adventures of American writer Cliff Bradshaw (portrayed by Antonio Munoz) as he ventures out of Paris and into Berlin in search of material for a novel. It isn’t long until he finds himself inside the notorious Kit Kat Club where sexy chanteuse Sally Bowles could become a character in his novel if he can avoid her distractions long enough to type more than a few paragraphs.

 

The Kit Kat is so far beyond your usual nightclub that it defies definition. People come here to forget their troubles, give pleasure precedence and dismiss the emerging political order as a passing phase and one unlikely to be as menacing as it seems.

 

In the bizarre sanctuary of the club, Bradshaw connects with Sally (Karissa Kiriu) and begins a problematic relationship that takes more twists and turns than even a romance novelist can begin to imagine. Like everything else at the Kit Kat, it’s all under the scrutiny and unrelenting satire of the emcee, played in sordid splendor by Anthony Allen as a man with many faces, many costumes and a taste for the outlandish. 

 

 Munoz plays Bradshaw as an earnest young man from Massachusetts, trying to find his novel in the deepening shadows of Berlin and the welcoming arms of Sally.  Asked about his native state, Bradshaw begins quoting something about a baseball game in a place called Mudville. Hello? Our writer then quotes the opening lines of “Casey at the Bat, ” a baseball classic that had its origin not in Massachusetts, but on Stockton’s Mudville Island, site of a vintage ballpark where visiting San Francisco newsman Ernest Thayer found inspiration for his immortal poem. Bradshaw has his geography wrong, but the missed connection to Stockton’s classic got a chuckle from this baseball fan.

 

Karissa Kiriu gives her all in the role of Sally and it’s a performance you don’t want to miss. She left many of us in the audience wondering how she had the energy and stamina to sustain a role that demands so much of her multiple talents. Given what she receives at the end of the play, when a frustrated and lovesick Bradshaw angrily urges her to do the sensible thing and save herself by escaping with him to America, what will Sally’s decision be? Whether or not she comes to her senses, of one thing we can be certain. Ms. Kiriu will be a leading SCT contender for outstanding performance in a 2024 musical. 

 

A far quieter but no less impressive role is that of Fraulein Schneider, a no-nonsense boarding house manager whom veteran actress Melissa Esau plays with the integrity and sensibility lacking most of the tenants in her rentals. The good frau’s loneliness is remedied, at least for the time being, by Herr Schultz (Ron Smith), a kindly and gentle fruit vendor. It seems the perfect love match, one far superior to the ill-matched Cliff and Sally, but can the relationship of these elders survive in a Germany on the brink of brutal tyranny?