Cabaret @ Arts Mission Oak Cliff / The Lost Boy Presents
Photos Corey Haynes, lighting design Ryan Burkle
—Chris Sanders
I have been going back and forth on how to write this review. I've already wasted several days trying to compile my thoughts without any order. And honestly, I feel my review might be unnecessary.
This joint production of Cabaret from The Lost Boy and Arts Mission Oak Cliff is brilliant. That’s the review in a nutshell. Director Sasha Mya Ada and Music Director Audra Scott use the script to take us on a harrowing journey that both starts and ends with a doomed train ride.
Though, I suppose I should expand on, or perhaps unpack, the various reasons why I believe this production to be brilliant. First, because this Cabaret made me realize that Kander and Ebb wrote their musical in the style of a Greek play. The Master of Ceremonies and the Kit Kat Club girls and boy serve as the Greek chorus. Their first few numbers help to establish the atmospher of the club itself, where many scenes are set. After a while, their songs and dances foreshadow or reaffirm events occurring among the wider circle of characters. The Emcee is the head of the chorus, lurking in the background and on the sidelines, watching the audience watch the action of the play.
The stage left entrance is used as a stairway for the various characters who live in the boarding house. In a Brechtian style, it serves as a pathway for the actors to make entrances and exits from different parts of the stage and from the audience. In a practical sense, it serves as a stairwell for the lodgers at the boarding house, who include major characters Sally and Clifford. What is fascinating is that while most of the characters go about their business, never looking at the audience as they go up and down the stairs, the Emcee always lingers and looks at us out there in the seats.
In further Brechtian style the band, led by Brandon Tyner, is firmly planted on the stage and remains from beginning to end. At some times they are simply the club band, at others more like a band at a wedding. And going even further than that, they begin to feel like a band that is going down with a ship. In some scenes we almost forget they’re there (right at center stage!); in other moments their presence is aggressively and wonderfully known.
Avery-Jai Andrews choreographs the Kit Kat Club to a T. The Kids are all in sync, without necessarily being in unison. They move dynamically through the audience, while still respecting the bodily autonomy of the audience members.
The LIGHTS! Ryan Burkle lights the show beautifully, particularly during Sally's Kit Kat numbers. At times Abigail Palmgren, who plays Sally, uses the lights almost as a dance or scene partner.
Palmgren's Sally Bowles is enchanting and heart-breaking. Cameron Casey's Clifford Bradshaw is charming and despicable. Brian Harden's Emcee is bewitching and judgmental, in a way that lets the audience know we are being found wanting. The entire cast plays their parts beautifully, performing in a way that is gut-wrenchingly and disturbingly human.
This Cabaret, says director Ada, “moves away from the white, cis-gendered Cabaret’’s of the past.” It is being performed, Ada notes, 78 years after the Nazis were defeated—though not in time to prevent the Holocaust. In our day, violent hate groups and white supremacists are resurfacing with a vengeance. Cabaret is a show anchored not only in past history, but in our own.
This was my first production of 2023, and the year is early, but it may keep its spot as my favorite. This is not a happy play. It's not supposed to be. It is a phenomenal and honest play, even as stylized as it is. With "gaslighting" being the word of 2022, I feel like we could use some more honesty in our art this year.
WHEN: Through January 21
WHERE: Arts Mission Oak Cliff, Dallas
WEB: artsmissionoc.org
