Confusing 'Cabaret' act

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What good is sitting alone in your room? For starters, you won't have to sit through Arena Stage's lugubrious production of "Cabaret," which takes an already politically charged musical and lards it over with contemporary references to anti-Semitism, homophobia, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and the erosion of American civil liberties after September 11.

That's a lot of weight for any show to carry, and the dark dazzle of John Kander and Fred Ebb's 1966 musical set in a debauched nightclub in pre-World War II Berlin nearly collapses from the strain.

Much of the sophistication is lost, and the wicked decadence of the piece -- based on Christopher Isherwood's biographical "Berlin Stories" -- not only evaporates, but all of a sudden seems squalid in the context of director Molly Smith's vision of "Cabaret" as a morality play and battleground for human rights.

That the production, although often visually sumptuous, is overblown and grandiose makes the whole experience especially incongruous. One minute it's "We Shall Overcome" and images of Jews being marched off to concentration camps, and the next, a bunch of cross-dressing chanteuses are slapping their garters and belting out "Mein Herr."

After awhile, you pity the entertainers and audiences at the Kit-Kat Club, a place where the Master of Ceremonies (Brad Oscar) boasts "Everyone is beautiful; even the orchestra is beautiful."

Of course, with the heady bohemianism of the Weimar Republic on the verge of collapse, the Kit-Kat singers and dancers are looking a mite worn and tattered, but the yearning for escape and wisps of glitter is palpable.

The cabaret's star, Sally Bowles (Meg Gillentine), still holds a strung-out allure that is irresistible to men, even sexually confused types like Clifford Bradshaw (Glenn Seven Allen), an American writer seeking experience and a whiff of Old World dissolution in Berlin.

He and Sally embark on a madcap affair born of convenience as much as sexual attraction. She needs a place to stay, and he has a room at a boardinghouse arranged by his Nazi-sympathizing benefactor, Ernst Ludwig (J. Fred Shiffman).

Sally and Cliff's fling is set against a more old-fashioned romance between landlady Fraulein Schneider (Dorothy Stanley) and her decorous Jewish suitor, Herr Schultz (Walter Charles), as well as the extremely sailor-friendly tenant Fraulein Kost (Sherri L. Edelen).

Arena's production uses elements and songs from the original 1966 Broadway production as well as from Bob Fosse's 1972 Oscar-winning film starring Liza Minnelli as an iconic Bowles.