Theater, London

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.

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Is the rarely performed Summer and Smoke first rate Tennessee Williams? I don’t know, but I’ve never seen a more powerful production of any of Williams’s plays.

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Matthew Lopez’s new play, The Inheritance, is a massive, nearly 7-hour work, performed in two parts, which we saw over two consecutive nights. It’s an intriguing re-working of Forster’s Howards End, imagined as a story of gay life in 21^stcentury New York. Forster himself (“Morgan” in the play) appears as well, helping the young men of the play tell their story.

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Like Network, Ink tackles the role of the media in today’s world. In James Graham’s new play, it’s 1969 and the young Rupert Murdoch has just purchased The Sun and is determined to disrupt the comfortable elitism of Fleet Street journalism.

Also like Network, the play features stellar actors moving with propulsive energy through a spectacular set. Unlike Network, it’s subtle and nuanced. It rejects any temptation to preach or make easy judgments.

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A day after seeing An American in Paris at the Dominion, I went to Dominic Cooke’s production of Follies at the National. An American in Paris is an exercise in nostalgia, with its predictable love story and Gershwin tunes. We go to bask in the make believe that Broadway perfected in the first half of the 20th century. Follies is no such comfort food. To paraphrase George Elliot’s assessment of Middlemarch, Follies may be the American musical written for grownups.

Sondheim deconstructs the nostalgia of the old musical and brings us to very dark places in this show. For all the darkness, though, I never feel that he rejects the sweet innocence of the older American musical. The music in this show is a remarkable combination of Sondheim’s contemporary worldly sophistication along with loving homages to the old Broadway masters.

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