Trevor Little wants you to know this: anyone who thinks the Cabrillo Stage production of Cabaret is going to consist of a talented local hottie in fishnets impersonating Liza Minnelli has another thing coming.
Well, OK. The talented local hottie in fishnets part is right. Briana Michaud, who plays Sally Bowles, is a veteran of six Cabrillo Stage shows, always as a dancer in the ensemble. Now that she’s stepped into the limelight, director Little says she’s blowing even him away—and he’s the one who cast her.
“She has a great voice, a big voice. She’s a lovely dancer and a beautiful girl, and I would have been happy with just that,” says Little, “but these are complicated, messy characters. I didn’t know [Briana] was capable of such subtlety and control.”
But impersonation? No way. For one thing, Little isn’t into recreating the roles everyone knows from the movies and records. Why bother? And for another, the play’s story line is different from that of the 1972 film; among other things, Sally and Cliff’s demi-monde romance, played out in the decadent nightclubs of pre-Nazi Berlin, is mirrored by that of their landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. “They have this slow, sweet courtship, and then she becomes very aware of what’s happening to the Jews,” says Little. “They’re the heart of the show. They’re the ones who will make you cry and break your heart.”
With its music, dancing and ornate set, Cabaret, which opens this Friday, is a guaranteed feast for the senses. And Roddy Kennedy in the critical role of the Emcee is what Little calls “a true triple threat”—a fearless singer, powerful dancer and skilled actor.
“Real, genuine triple threats are rare,” Little says. “In musical theater, usually the acting is what’s missing, I find. They have a bag of tricks, they know how to do archetypes. I think this is the best acting cast I’ve ever worked with. To get great actors I didn’t have to compromise on anything else.”
So entertainment is assured. But Cabaret has a dark side, and Little makes no bones about the fact that he hopes audiences get it—including the parallels with today in terms of political apathy and escapism. While personal freedoms and other cherished ideals flourished during the Weimar Republic, hyperinflation, political paralysis and poor administration produced an alienated and frustrated citizenry, paving the way for what came next.
“Sally has a line: ‘Politics? What does that have to do with us?’ We’re in the middle of an unpopular war, and that is a terrible thing, but how much do we really think about it?” Little asks. “I hope in this production we have a sense of what’s going on outside the cabaret, how the greater world is affecting the cabaret. Hitler, though not onstage, is definitely a character. They never utter his name in the show, but we always know it’s coming. I hope it can put people in a frame of mind to ask themselves, ‘How could this happen? It happened before, it could happen again.’ And you don’t get a lot of musicals that ask you to think about that.”
For tickets and schedule, visit www.cabrillostage.com.
