In 1998 I was at the height of my theater going passion. I considered it part three of a cultural trial by fire which had included film -I watched every movie Renoir directed during three nights at the Film Forum, and music, tracking down every recording Patsy Cline and Louis Armstrong released back when it took more than a click of a search button, well part three was to get a handle on theater. So I did it.
Over a period of maybe three years I went to every single Broadway and off Broadway show, and among them was Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles (and Alan Cummings as the emcee) in Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s “Cabaret” based on the Christopher Isherwood Berlin stories . I saw it before it moved a couple of blocks uptown, at the “Kit Kat Club” on West 43rd before moving to West 54th Street.
“Cabaret” is, of course, the Liza Minelli meets Bob Fosse bonkers during the Weimar Republic Ebbs and Kander musical. An Oscar winning masterpiece, and the Sam Mendes rethink is not in the same league. For one reason? It is lost in time like all theater. And sitting in the Kit Kat club and watching this overlong production, Mendes kept in all the stuff Fosse cut out, specifically a subplot of love among the middle aged.
It went on, the end of the first act made me fidget, and while the end will make you gasp, the middle will make you wish they’d get on with it.
But Natasha Richardson was superb. Not a great singer but as a woman who doesn’t need breaks because it’s all downhill a terrifying star turn. Here is Sheila O’Malley in 2009 discussing Natasha singing “Cabaret”: “In the final moments, as the pace of the song started to pick up, Richardson, violently trembling, started reaching her arms up and out to the light (only she could barely manage it because of how much she was shaking: she looked incredibly thin and fragile), screaming, on tune, yes, but not pretty, nothing you want to listen to for pleasure, “Life is a cabaret, old chum/only a cabaret, old chum/and I love a cabaret.” She held the last note, arms up, and as it went on and on, rasping, un-pretty, the wail of a woman who was swirling down never to emerge again, her face took on the look of the screaming figure in Edvard Munch’s famous painting. All of this was happening at the same time. It was terrifying.”
This was a Tony Award winning turn by Richardson, an actress? Her Grandfather was Michael Redgrave, her mother Vanessa Redgrave and with this performance which seemed to stare at a complete failure to get her life right was a mesmerizing disaster. I’ve actually known a couple of Sally Bowles in my time, back in the 1970s, borderline hookers working at Lebanese nightclubs in front of very rich Sheiks and they had a similar sense of fear in the face in an inexcusable future. One of them was a close friend who ended up a junkie and spent two years in jail before straightening her life out.
Watching Richardson’s Bowles, it had the ring of truth and observation. A realness but realness we don’t want to really know. I prefer Minelli’s star turn but who wouldn’t want to see that? But Richardson was true. It was acting at the highest level.