Dancing on the Surface in Cabaret and Orlando

One may as well begin with Jackie Hoffman’s Twitter. “Preshow at Cabaret incredibly talented performers,” she wrote, “giving immersive, but annoying experience.”

People tend to have strong reactions when the word “immersive” starts getting thrown around—it’s like “vegan”—but for my money, too few pieces of theater consider the totality of the audience’s experience, instead staying in the conventional space between “Please turn off your cell phones” and applause. Where extratextual atmosphere is concerned, Rebecca Frecknall’s glitzy revival—imported from London like so many bottles of gin—goes all-out. The audience is directed down a covered alley and in through the theater’s back door, past dark drapes and beaded curtains, flickering neon, ushers that hand you shots of schnapps, and signs that say LOOK, DON’T TOUCH (these, freshly printed and taped up, had the feeling of a last-minute addition, perhaps in response to recent events). The downstairs lobby at the August Wilson has been transformed into a louche, luxe speakeasy. Performers dance on pedestals and play instruments (special commendations to Michael Winograd for wailing on the Klezmer clarinet); people buy expensive themed cocktails; lights twinkle, and above the entry, three words are emblazoned: “Gaiety … Pity … Truth.”

It is a crush—bodies, bodies everywhere—but I had a better time than Jackie. Sadly, I also had a better time there than I did during the performance itself. Atmosphere is all in the loose hustle and bustle of a pre-show, but in a play proper, it can only carry you so far. While Frecknall has put a lot of energy into giving Cabaret a glow-up—Sleep No More mood board, Eddie Redmayne in a party hat—she hasn’t provided the show underneath the makeover with sufficient focus or muscle. Choreographer Julia Cheng and production designer Tom Scutt help give scenes striking shapes and looks, but Frecknall’s lead performers exude the feeling that they’ve either been left to their own devices or that the main note they’ve received has been some version of “Just make it weird and different.” It’s a banal problem to mention, but John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote some wildly good songs, and all too often, I couldn’t really hear them. If this Cabaret were a cake, Paul Hollywood would shake his head and sigh, northern-ly: Style over soobstance.

It’s not that the performers aren’t trying. As the naïve, swept-away American narrator, Cliff Bradshaw, Ato Blankson-Wood is doing his best to bring vulnerability, sincerity, and even some dignity to the part; but it’s always a bit of a surprise to recall just how often Cliff is left on the sidelines, and just how little he sings (a real loss here, given Blankson-Wood’s gorgeous voice). And as the strung-out Kit Kat Club singer, Sally Bowles, Gayle Rankin is making every effort to leave her guts on the stage, but she’s not getting any help. Rankin has the ability to be wrenching and spectacular — I once watched her swim across a lake in the dark, climb out and play Nina’s devastating Act Four scene from The Seagull, get back in, and swim away again. But her delivery of “Maybe This Time” and of the show’s final drill to the stomach, its great title song, is hampered by extraneous gesture. She flickers between singing, talking, and half-singing in a way that feels like a misguided directorial attempt to make the songs new, but that ends up making Rankin seem nervous about her ability to deliver them. I have no doubt that she really can, and I wish Frecknall had helped her find more connection and more release.

Rankin and Blankson-Wood are reaching for something, and are visibly supporting each other — but as the Emcee, Eddie Redmayne is on his own look-at-me planet. His singing voice never leaves a plugged-up, somewhat Muppet-y place somewhere behind his nose, and his physical palette is all coyly twirling fingers and hunched-up, leering Gollum poses. He’s clearly loving doing a voice, but his diction is a mess. Far too many of the razor-edged lyrics that come out of his mouth are nearly indecipherable. The vibes are all over the place, from Dieter on Sprockets to drunk Gussie Fink-Nottle. It all reads as affectation, never as the crucial combination of things the Emcee, however accessorized, has to be: both charming and dangerous. The Kit Kat Club’s master of ceremonies is a kind of Mephistopheles, and also—if an actor really nails it—a sinister mirage of ambiguity. Is the club just a funhouse mirror for the horrible march of history outside its walls — the emcee and his dancers simply shadows, stretched to gruesome, Expressionist proportions, of the rise of Nazism? Or is this a subversive space, a queer space, a dark and knowing satire of the fascism that’s coming, and a group of people who are likely—and they know it—to end up near the very top on Hitler’s lists of “degenerates”?

Ideally, as is almost always the case in theater, the answer is both. The Emcee should frighten and entice us, elicit our revulsion and, in his own bizarre way, stand for “gaiety, pity, truth.” But Redmayne isn’t seeking a deep connection with us; he’s just vogueing, and Frecknall is letting him. She’s also pushing him, the Kit Kat Club, and the whole production toward an aesthetic banality of evil by the end of the show, thereby eschewing the possibility for a more ambivalent reading of the “beautiful” world represented by Cabaret’s sparkling creatures of the underground.

Thank goodness, therefore, for Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell. Any production of this show has the potential to become the story not of its young leads but of the heartbreaking romance between Cliff’s landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and the sweet-natured old fruit vendor who loves her, Herr Schultz. But this production can’t help it. When Neuwirth and Skybell enter the stage, it feels as if someone has taken the reins. Suddenly, the singing is beautiful and full of character, the story is clear and stirring, the stakes are high, the humor deft and generous. These are consummate pros: They fill the space with ease and breath, they make everyone around them better, and they trust the play. Neuwirth’s ashamed, anguished “What Would You Do?” is shattering, and “It Couldn’t Please Me More” (i.e. the pineapple song) is so lovable that the pre-grieving starts immediately. Frecknall has abundant riches to work with, and she knows her #vibes — what she’s created is slick and entertaining, sometimes even ingenious, but all Neuwirth and Skybell have to do is make a quiet entrance to remind us how much more is possible.

Another way to think of Cabaret’s Emcee might be as a living embodiment of the spirit of the age — or, to put it in his native tongue, the Zeitgeist. We’re all subject to it, but not many get to see its countenance and carriage change over the course of more than a single century. Such a one is the hero of Orlando. Virginia Woolf published her breathtaking novella about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives more than 300 years—and, halfway through, becomes a woman—in 1928. (A young writer named Christopher Isherwood once missed a train to Paris for a romantic assignation because he got so caught up having tea with Woolf that he stayed for hours — “She had that effect on people,” he said. A year after she published Orlando, he traveled to Berlin, where his experiences would inspire the book that eventually gave rise to Cabaret.) The spirit of the age hovers over Woolf’s protagonist; he, then she, always reflects it, but never unconsciously. Orlando wants, more than anything in the world, to write poetry — so of course she has a strange relationship with time.

Now time has brought Orlando back to the New York stage in the charismatic person of writer-performer-and-all-around-theater-beast, Taylor Mac. It’s been too long since Sarah Ruhl’s 2010 adaptation of “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” (so called by the son of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, who inspired the novella) has had a mainstage airing here. Ruhl’s script is a jewel — shimmering and multifaceted, delicate but full of depth and integrity. It’s a gift for a director and a playful, ever-transfiguring ensemble of actors, and I wish the production currently at Signature Theatre made more of it.

Under Will Davis’s direction, with Mac (who uses the pronoun “judy”) in the title role, this Orlando is arch and good-natured—like the cool kid at art school who’s actually quite sweet—but never as vulnerable or as viscerally moving as it might be. Davis and scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado have stripped Signature’s vast Irene Diamond stage back to its bare walls; on either side, tall studio lights with their glowing umbrella canopies—along with Oana Botez’s streetwear-meets-runway mash-up of period–ish costumes—give the show the feeling of a high fashion photoshoot. There’s a lot of droll catwalk stomping and posing, but the ensemble of seven never generates enough energy to fill up the space.

Ruhl’s text is almost entirely direct address: She hews closely to Woolf’s rollicking prose—with its wondrous peaks and its dark, pensive valleys—and tells Orlando’s story through a chorus of narrators, constantly accompanying the hero and becoming the characters he (we’ll start with “he”) encounters on his singular journey. No matter how many actors make up the show’s ensemble (Ruhl notes that it can be done with “as few as three… or as many as you can fit on a stage and pay”), they’ve got to create whole worlds, sweeping the play along like a great human wave. Here, the ensemble’s vigor feels diffused in the wide space. Davis tends to keep the action centered, allowing large backdrops to take up more room than the kinesphere of his performers. Though there are a few entr’acte dance breaks (also choreographed by Davis) that make use of more of the stage, these have a generalized spirit of dance club fun — they don’t tell us much about where we are in the story, or what’s going on with Orlando’s evolving personhood.

They’re also being used to cover Mac’s big costume switches, and while there’s nothing wrong with that on the surface, it’s a pity that—in a play all about the constant of transformation—our hero exits the stage every time she (let’s go with “she” now) needs to change. There’s a wonderful bawdiness to Woolf’s text that’s also being missed here: As a young man, the beautiful Orlando has plenty of sex, with everyone from the aging Queen Elizabeth (Nathan Lee Graham, dressed like a gold battleship and channeling the Red Queen) to the first true love of his life, the Russian princess Sasha (a beguiling Janice Amaya) to, in a heartbroken rebound fling, a nutty archduchess from Romania (Lisa Kron bedecked in elaborate headwear). But Davis’s production is surprisingly demure, especially when the comedy draws closer to real feeling.

Part of Orlando’s journey—as he travels to Constantinople, wakes up one day in a new body, and then sails home as a She in a new century—has to do with the strange and tragic discovery, and then the transcendence, of modesty and shame. When the stuffy nineteenth century arrives, Orlando is overcome with vibrations of desire: “Life! A Lover!” she thinks aloud, but the spirit of the age replies, “No, Orlando. Life, a husband!” She will find a husband who’s also a lover — a man with as much fluidity of spirit as she has, who actually sees and understands her (played by Rad Pereira, who’s dashing if a little hard to hear). But neither in this crucial relationship, nor in Orlando’s first defining love affair with Sasha, does Davis have the actors lean fully into intimacy. Their interactions are sweet but almost shy; in the end, the text feels more celebratory of the body and of desire, in all their myriad forms, than the production does.

Mac is a natural and wonderful clown with an inherent sprightliness, and some of judy’s best moments come in little bursts of improvisation — as when Orlando and Sasha hop down into the first row of the seating bank to watch a London street performance, and Mac squeezes past audience members while ad-libbing: “Oh these groundlings have so many bags!” Or when Orlando, newly a woman, is being courted by a tedious archduke (also Kron), and Mac’s thigh-high patent leather red boots squeak thunderously against each other every time judy attempts a ladylike cross or re-cross of the legs in the duke’s presence. These playful gestures feel true to the bright mischief of the material — but there are balancing shadows that are missing.

Orlando—as Woolf did—experiences overwhelming bouts of depression, nadirs of sorrow and solitude that Woolf envisions as voyages at sea, or even as periods of living death. “After some hours of death, usually a bird would shriek,” says her husband, “And she would come to life again.” Christopher Isherwood remembered Virginia Woolf as being “up to the sky one minute, down into despair and darkness the next.” Though Orlando is and always will be a magnificent love letter, it can’t help also being a eulogy. As both novella and piece of theater, its miracle lies in its alchemy of light and dark — of pain and poetry, silliness and grandeur, wonder and uncertainty, woman and man and the whole expansiveness of the human soul that can’t quite be described by either word, by any simple duality. Davis and his company stick to the sunlit shore of the play, finding some of its humor and loveliness, but they never venture into its deeper waters.

➼ Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club is at the August Wilson Theatre.
➼ Orlando is at Signature Theatre through May 12.