Life is a Cabaret old chum

We’re in London for a few days. Last night we went to see Cabaret at the Kit-Kat Club (the Playhouse Theatre, skilfully converted for the run of the show) starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley. It was absolutely marvellous and lived up to its excellent reviews. I won’t go into too much detail about the production because anyone lucky enough to be going to see it will want to find out for themselves the way the director, Rebecca Frecknall, has portrayed the building tensions as Nazi influence grows in 1930s Berlin. 

The Emcee played by Eddie Redmayne is delightfully mischievous as well as voyeuristic and cynical. Jessie Buckley portrays Sally Bowles as a brittle mixture of toughness and fragility, and her rendition of the song Cabaret was amazing - and very different from that of Liza Minelli in the film version. The rest of the cast were very strong singers and dancers and the love story between Herr Schulz and Frau Schneider was very moving. 

I was very impressed that we were entertained from the moment we arrived at 6.15 p.m. until we left four hours later; the show itself was about two hours long but there was so much going on in the bars and the theatre before the performance. The theatre was meticulously decorated in 1930s style with a round and sometimes revolving stage, and the tables all had wee lamps and telephones on them. James manfully drank my share of the two shots of Schnapps and the bottle of champagne provided with our meal! We even saw a celebrity in the audience - Louis Theroux - I do love celebrity spotting! 

I loved the show. I know the film very well, it was a favourite of my parents, and I’m very fond of it. The show was different, and in one or two places I felt that the film had captured a scene or a song better than this stage show. But these few issues were more than made up for by the energy and immediacy of this fantastic version of Cabaret. I was transfixed throughout and it’s an experience that I will always remember.

When we got back to our Ibis hotel (very nice) Ally phoned and at his suggestion we went to the window where we could see Cat switching the lights on and off at their flat, on the other side of Canning Town station across at Goodluck Hope! We then switched on and off my phone torch and they could see us too! Great fun.