Kander & Ebb’s musical masterpiece CABARET opened in the West End last night, in a starry revival of Rufus Norris’s stylised 2006 production featuring pop star Will Young and EastEnders and Bionic Woman actress Michelle Ryan.
Set during the last days of Germany’s Weimar Republic, Will Young stars as the Emcee of Berlin cabaret den The Kit Kat Club. He is joined by Michelle Ryan as cabaret singer Sally Bowles, a role made famous by Liza Minnelli in the Oscar-winning movie, plus Sian Phillips as Fraulein Schneider and Matt Rawle as Cliff.
Once again choreography is by Javier De Frutos and design by Katrina Lindsay.
Check out what the critics made of Cabaret, below. Reading this on a tablet or iPhone? Click here.
"[Will Young] has a genuinely disconcerting stage presence with his slicked-down hair, lustful eyes and predatory stillness, and there is a potent mixture of malignity and glee in his performance. As you would expect he sings well too... Norris’s unexpected ending to the show, which it would be a crime to reveal, is even more chilling, and one leaves this patchy but inventive production with a shiver of deep unease." Read more
The Independent
★★★
"[Michelle Ryan] signally fails to rise to the occasion of Sally Bowles. Instead of showing us the emotional flakiness and need behind the heroine's show of worldly bravado, she gives us a wholesome, healthy girl who is about as “divinely decadent” as a lacrosse match followed by a hearty cream tea. Deficient in either charisma or sense of inner conflict, her performance of both “Maybe This Time” and the title number is painful in quite the wrong ways. The show is still worth seeing for its bold imaginative sweep and for Sian Phillips's deeply touching Fraulein Schneider, even if coming to thisCabaret is not quite what it was, old chum." Read more
Evening Standard
★★★
"Rufus Norris’s take on Cabaret isn’t new. It was staged, to great plaudits, in 2006. Here, with bigger stars, it remains inventive but feels less concertedly political and less depraved. There’s more glamour and not so deep a sense of the disturbing." Read more
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