Flat Rock – The most spectacular local bonus is seeing Lisa K. Bryant (Sally Bowles) on the FRP stage for the first time in her ten years as FRP artistic director. Bryant was last on the Leiman Mainstage 12 years ago, as Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray.
This time, she stars as sassy showgirl Sally Bowles with a buoyant, upscale English accent and an adventurous spirit. She fathoms herself as “mysterious and fascinating,” and playfully “tawdry and terrible.” Bryant enters up the theater’s main aisle.
Bryant acted in FRP before moving up administrative ranks and running the official state theater in recent years. She’s directed many FRP productions. Her husband, John Bryant, is a recent Henderson County Public Schools superintendent.
Lisa Bryant, low-toned Amy Jo Jackson as buxom floozy Fraulein Kost, and oft-smiling Joseph Medeiros (cabaret emcee) showcase magnificent vocals and accents in Cabaret on opening night last Friday, July 12. Bryant sensationally sings “Maybe This Time,” about hoping she’ll “get lucky” with a long-term romance and finally “win.” After she enthusiastically performed title song “Cabaret,” the packed crowd exploded with applause and cheers. Bryant grinned.
Cabaret has creative choreography, brisk dance pacing, and clever staging such as rotating side stages that seat customers in nightclub scenes. Kost sings on a bordering house room substage as it steadily slides across the main stage.
Jazzy music by Kander and Ebb, performed live backstage, bolsters festiveness of raucous, seedy, countercultural Kit Kat Klub in 1929-30 Berlin, Germany. The club has telephones with which dancers and patrons can proposition each other during shows.
There are many trysts in backstage dressing rooms, and in a sleazy boarding house run by Fräulein Schneider (FRP veteran Marcy McGuigan). She tries to tame Kost’s tricks. Schneider quips that with so many sailors filing in and out, “What do they think I’m running — a battleship?”
Chase Brock
Brock, 40, is Cabaret’s director and choreographer. “My heart is full to overflowing thanks to this beautiful and tireless group of actors, dancers, stage managers, music directors and more,” Brock stated on Facebook. “We’ve been imagining and designing and casting” for nearly a year.
The former FRP student and apprentice first acted on Broadway at age 16. His New York City-based Chase Brock Experience dance theater has put on 31 shows in the last dozen years, and dancing for video game Dance on Broadway for Nintendo Wii and PlayStation Move.
Brock’s show Big Shot in 2022 is inspired by his family’s drive-in restaurant Brock’s of Hendersonville, a popular teen hangout in 1949-72. Brock & Associates has provided insurance locally since 1964.
Attacking Anti-Semitism
The captivating storyline’s sub-plot is about pre-World War II Nazi Germany and its anti-Jewish persecution, and the reaction to it by visiting American writer Cliff Bradshaw (Parker Pogue). Sadly, this theme is quite timely with a proliferation of anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian rallies here and abroad and angry chants for Israeli Jews to be driven “from the river to the sea” and exterminated.
The play’s brief, 30-minute second act ends with a surprising, tragic twist. Earlier, the unthinkable is pulled off visually. It’s a somehow tasteful image of the evil Holocaust — a hellishly flame-like open room that symbolizes dreadful lethal gas and incineration chambers. Adolf Hitler cemented his dictatorship in 1933, two years after the play’s setting early into the global Great Depression. His “ethnic cleansing” of Jews in Europe happened soon afterward.
Pogue is prolific as Cliff. The struggling author travels to London, Paris, and then Berlin looking for literary topics and a bohemian lifestyle. Low-budget Cliff stays in that boarding house.
Herr Schultz (Bruce Sabath), an elderly Jewish-German fruit shop owner, lives there. Schultz and Schneider get engaged. But she gets pressured to not marry a Jew, by Ernest Ludwig.
Scott Treadway is slick as Ludwig. He befriends Cliff on a train, and gets him to smuggle fine perfumes from Paris. Ludwig acts as a fine gentleman. Treadway amps up sly grins, snickering and cackling and reveals a swastika armband. Ludwig is a cunning Nazi official. Once Cliff realizes this, he’s on a collision path with him. That adds punch to the plot. Treadway, the face of the playhouse for 41 years, brilliantly continues his self-proclaimed “season of evil characters.”
Cabaret Legacy
The play, a drama scripted in 1951 by John Van Druten, is based on English writer Christopher Isherwood‘s stories about his time in 1920s Berlin and with lounge singer Jean Ross. He briefly shared a room in Berlin with Jean, just as Cliff does with Sally.
Cabaret was a 1955 film. Famed film director Sam Mendes (1917, et al) directed the musical adaptation in 1993. Bryant stated, “We hope to honor the long journey this show has taken from a smoky cabaret in Berlin to the hearts of theatergoers all over the world.”
Cabaret runs through Aug. 3. To purchase tickets, check https://www.flatrockplayhouse.org/cabaret.