Rebecca Frecknall’s exciting staging of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret once again proves her mastery in reanimating theatre classics. She exposes the show’s duality with relish—the delirious hedonism of Weimar nightlife pitched against the creeping dread of Nazi authoritarianism.
Tom Scutt’s design is a delight. The 19th-century Playhouse Theatre is reborn as the Kit Kat Club — audiences snake through a subterranean passageway lined with Weimar-era posters, then fortified with a complimentary shot of schnapps they enter an immersive den of decadence. Cast members cavort, flirt, and play instruments before curtain-up, blurring spectator and spectacle. Inside, a revolving stage rises and falls like a tiered wedding cake, while cabaret tables edge the playing space as the orchestra peers down from the original box seats.
Frecknall amplifies the musical’s carnality through the Emcee and the Kit Kat ensemble—men and women dressed in Scutt’s sublime, gender-fluid costumes, who gyrate with lewd abandon — the high energy choreography is by Julia Cheng. Intriguingly, they also act as a kind of Weimar kuroko, gliding on props and scenery with eerie invisibility, dissolving the seams between dialogue and song.
At the centre is Sally Bowles, the brittle British chanteuse whose pursuit of love is as reckless as it is doomed. Hannah Dodd brings vocal strength, if at times she catches some shrill tones. She doesn’t quite plummet the depth of Sally’s contradictions—her brittle bravado, alongside her moments of trauma. Daniel Bowerbank lends Clifford a likeable American earnestness, though their chemistry remains underpowered. By contrast, Rob Madge is a luscious Emcee: simultaneously complicit in the debauchery, whilst prescient to the gathering storm of Nazi ascendency.
The quieter love story between Vivien Parry’s Fraulein Schneider and Fenton Gray’s Herr Schultz provides the evening’s most heartfelt moments. Their doomed romance, shadowed by Schultz’s Jewish identity, exposes the cruel intersection of the personal and political—a reminder of the play’s wider tragedy.
The finale strips away feathers and sequins, leaving the company slowing circling on the turntable in drab brown suits, the descent into conformity and repression, and the fear is starkly felt. What begins as a dazzling party ends as a requiem for a society dancing itself into horror.
The Kit Kat Club at The Playhouse Theatre
Cabaret
Book: Joe Masteroff
Music: John Kander
Lyrics: Fred Ebb
Director: Rebecca Frecknall
Scenic and Costume Design: Tom Scutt
Choreography: Julia Cheng
Cast: Hannah Dodd, Rob Madge, Daniel Bowerbank, Vivien Parry, Fenton Gray, Fred Haig, and Jessica Kirton
Rob Madge and Hannah Dodd will appear until: 20 September 2025
Running Time: 2 hours, 45 minutes, including interval
Photo Credit: Marc Brenner