Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club - Wilkommen einmal

Privileged to have been there on press night three years four months ago - rave review here - and equally so to be invited back, albeit following an initial request, to see the great Billy Porter (centre above in the first of Marc Brenner's production photos) as the new Emcee. 

This is still the most perfect show that I know on the London stage - it was the best thing I saw in 2021, operas and plays included. The backstage/outside auditorium entertainment has been augmented - if I remember right about the first time - to include a small space where one of the dancers worked miracles around a violinist and pianist. If the first half seems even more extreme now - OTT is part of it - that only makes the darkening shadows of the second all the more sinister. The audience laughed bitterly when Cliff asks Sally to follow him to 'safe' America. And director Rebecca Frecknell's minimising the swastikas and enveloping the cast in anonymous suits insists on how totalitarianism can take hold anywhere, any time (Porter 'conducting' the final scene below).

A condition of my visit was that I wasn't going to write a review as such. My emphasis is on the continuity of this extraordinary show, how it continues to sell out, be revitalised by all the cast changes since Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley wowed us. What I will say is that Sally full of inner rage is also what we get from Marisha Wallace, giving another consummate artistic spin on 'Maybe this time' and storming in 'Life is a Cabaret'. As with Buckley, I'm left wondering how such an intense performance can happen night after night (though Wallace isn't singing in all performances).

Both Fraulein Schneiders and Herr Schultzes have been very fine, but I'll repeat - none will surpass the pair we had in our Edinburgh University Theatre Company production, which I've written about twice before. 

Kerry Richardson, the Schneider, who made me weep every night in 'What Would You Do?', went with me the other week to the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond to see Peter Forbes, the Schultz, as Stalin, no less, in Howard Brenton's outstanding new play Churchill in Moscow. Here they both are after the show. 

We all knew Peter would be the one to succeed, and now he's come into his own as, among many other things, the best Buddy Plummer I've seen, in the National Theatre production of Follies. The Stalin role, probably the first time the character has had an inner monologue (springing from a Pushkin poem), is just as important as that of Churchill - the nominal star (because he's a name) Roger Allam. Production photos here by Tristram Kenton.

The unpredictable turns in their relationship, with both actors playing off each other to perfection, is mirrored by their interpreters, fictional creations but delicious ones: RAF Lieutenant Sally Powell (Jo Herbert) and Red Army Lieutenant Olga Dovzhenko (Elisabeth Snegir). It turns out, of course, that MI5 meets NKVD here. The two pairs waver between a move towards what they have in common and a deeper knowledge that more separates them than can ever connect them

In the games of the couples, we also see Molotov pitted against UK Ambassador Archie Clark Kerr. The solitary individual is Svetlana, Stalin's teenage daughter. I can see why she ends the play looking towards her breaking-free of the allotted role, but there was a sense of 'oh, is that it?' Otherwise, a wonderful piece of theatrical twists and turns. No-one was sure when we went whether there would be a West End transfer, but we hope and pray there is. 

As for awards, how would you privilege Allam over Forbes any more than you could choose between Ben Whishaw and Lucien Msamati in Waiting for Godot? Peter, of course, the most genuinely modest and thoughtful of people, doesn't seem that bothered. In the last two weeks he was also going in to rehearsal as Leonato in the RSC's forthcoming Much Ado About Nothing. He's already a stage legend to those of us who've been following his career since that Edinburgh Cabaret.