Cabaret review – Alan Cumming is saucy and menacing in a sly revival
8 / 10
The 1998 production was staged in the same venue, Studio 54, and starred Jennifer Jason Leigh as Sally Bowles, which she played with spiky, unpredictable abandon. Michelle Williams is a very different kind of actor, in this instance gauche, touching, unsure of herself in a way that seems as true to the idea of Sally Bowles as more robust approaches...As was the case the first time round, the show is Alan Cumming's and his MC has to be one of the great stage performances of all time. It's so rare to get a second shot at seeing something this good, you should do anything you can to get a ticket. Where Joel Grey, in the movie version, was impish and sinister, Cumming is brutish, jack-booted, playing the part with a yobbish licentiousness that highlights just how close the satirist and the satirised come to looking to each other in the end. It's a hard thing to be saucy and menacing at the same time, but Cumming pulls it off.
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