Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome! 

From the jump, Cabaret’s emcee (an electrifying Callum Scott Howells) invites us into the world of the Kit Kat Club, a 1930s Berlin cabaret.

And we really are at the Kit Kat Klub, since the West End’s Playhouse Theatre has been converted into that seedy joint. We enter via a stage door, where we’re given a glass of schnapps before proceeding along dingy corridors to a series of bars set up for pre-show entertainment. I stayed in the Grüne Bar (the Rote Bar and Goldene Bar were upstairs) and sipped my schnapps alongside a beaded curtain, through which I could watch musicians and scantily clad dancers.

The illusion continues when we enter the theatre proper. I did not hand over £200+ to get a café table next to the stage (the small circular stage is surrounded by the audience), but my seat, next to a dim table lamp, had a worn wooden table for drinks, and I was close enough to feel that I was present in the club. 

And that’s important. Director Rebecca Frecknall has designed this whole experience so that we feel not just immersed, but complicit, in everything that takes place in this story.

I think of Sally Bowles, the troubled and self-deluded performer, as the main character of this show, the one who ties together the two worlds of the cabaret and the world outside it.

But in this production, it’s the emcee who ties together these two worlds even more than Sally does. As the rise of Hitler shuts down the decadent cabaret world, the shapeshifting emcee reveals that he knows full well how to adapt to and ride the waves of history. 

He may not run a cabaret under the Nazi regime, but he’s going to run something. Best not to think what that may be.

It’s the emcee who first sings the Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” If the meaning of this song is not yet entirely clear, a bit of stage business provides the necessary foreshadowing. While he sings, low light reveals small figurines standing at attention on the outer revolve of the stage.

It’s also the emcee, not the lodger Fräulein Kost, who leads the reprise of this song at the end of Act I. We’re at the engagement celebration for the landlady, Fräulein Schneider, and the Jewish grocer, Herr Schmidt, when friendly Ernst appears with his swastika armband and the Nazi threat is fully revealed. 

The doomed relationship of this elderly couple is the tender heart of the show. Mesmerizing and explicit as the cabaret dances are, none of them is as erotic as Fräulein Schneider tenderly inserting a pineapple, a gift from Herr Schmidt, into a paper bag. “I think I need to lie down,” she flutters as the pineapple comes to rest in the bottom of the bag.

By Act II, Fräulein Schneider has realized it’s too dangerous for her to marry her gentle suitor, and the omnipresent emcee brings to mind the wedding that will not happen when he places a glass wrapped in cloth at their feet. As he stomps on it we hear the crash of Kristallnacht and glass shards rain down on the stage.

It’s chilling to feel that this master of ceremonies is master of far more than the show we’re attending, where, he has assured us, we can leave our troubles outside and where “everything is beautiful.” 

While he appears to be omnipresent, he disappears long enough to reappear time and again in new and more outrageous costumes. But of all the outrageous costumes the emcee wears over the course of the evening, the last is the most shocking—a drab brown suit. 

In a callback to Tomorrow Belongs to Me, all the cabaret performers are now dressed in similar brown suits and hats and they stand before us on the revolve, much like the figurines in Act I, as the emcee sings the final reprise of Willkommen.

Welcome to a new world. The fun is over.