One of Broadway's greatest productions returns! Alan Cumming ("The Good Wife," Roundabout's The Threepenny Opera) reprises his Tony-winning performance as the Emcee in Sam Mendes (Skyfall, American Beauty) and Rob Marshall's (Nine and Chicago, the films) Tony-winning production of Cabaret. Three-time Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn, Brokeback Mountain) also stars, making her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles, alongside Tony nominees Danny Burstein (Follies, South Pacific) and Linda Emond (Death of a Salesman, Life (x) 3). Right this way, your table's waiting at Cabaret, John Kander, Fred Ebb and Joe Masteroff's Tony-winning musical about following your heart while the world loses its way.
Starting November 11, the Kit Kat Klub welcomes Golden Globe nominee Emma Stone (Easy A, The Help), making her Broadway debut as Sally Bowles for a limited time only.
Let me quickly specify that Cumming, repeating the role that brought him a Tony 16 years ago, is every juicy leer as good now as he was then in his role of the deliciously decadent compere at the Third Reich's Kit Kat Klub in Berlin...Time now unfortunately, for the problems besetting this Cabaret incarnation. The major one is the accomplished movie star Michelle Williams in her Main Stem bow as Sally Bowles...The singing's not the snag. Just about everything else, starting with her English accent, is...The high point and low point of her performance are the same: her rendition of the title song. Technically, she delivers it extremely well and for her efforts receives sustained applause. As an expression of Sally Bowles's state of mind, the way librettist Joe Masteroff and Ebb write, Williams has it all wrong--and so have director Mendes, Marshall and Onrubia, if they're allowing this misconstrued treatment.
A little more than 16 years after it first opened, and only a decade after it closed, it feels as if the popular Roundabout Theater Company production of 'Cabaret' never left Studio 54, where it reopened on Thursday night. Alan Cumming, who won a Tony as the nasty M.C. in 1998, is back, offering a slightly looser, older-but-wiser variation on the same performance...The most conspicuous difference is the bright blond actress portraying Sally...The promiscuous, hard-partying Sally is now embodied by a very brave Michelle Williams, who doesn't look all that happy to be there. I'm assuming that's more a matter of character interpretation than of personal discomfort, but it does put sort of a damper on the festivities...Leading the Kit Kat girls in nightclub production numbers like 'Don't Tell Mama' and 'Mein Herr' with a shiny, metallic vibrato, Ms. Williams comes closer to evoking the musical style of the Depression than any Sally I've seen. And for her climactic performance of the show's title song, she has the shouty power and shell-shocked stare of someone who's seen the future and knows that it's terrifying.
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