It was announced yesterday that life will soon be a cabaret no more in the West End - Rufus Norris’s production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret will end its run at the Lyric on June 21 (though we needn’t feel its absence for too long - the show then hits the touring road at the end of August). By coincidence, I found this news out in Washington DC, where I had travelled yesterday to visit a new production of K&E’s last completed musical The Visit. And the day before, I had also re-visited Curtains, Ebb’s final posthumously produced original show whose work had been completed by Rupert Holmes, before that show closes on June 21.
If the giddy, old-fashioned musical comedy charms of Curtains caught the self-referential mood of recent times - joining shows like The Producers and Monty Python’s Spamalot in being about the backstage process of putting on musicals — The Visit is a darker throw-back to the Kander and Ebb of Cabaret and Chicago.
Like those shows, it offers the dazzling juxtaposition of their glittering but jagged music and lyrics with a compelling story of the nastier manifestations to human behaviour. In this case a tale of revenge and retribution is mercilessly pursued to an inevitable conclusion: it’s like Sweeney Todd without the razors, but cuts just as deep in its grim but sometimes equally gleeful journey. Friedrich Durrenmatt’s play provides them with the perfect platform to articulate the tensions between light and shade that their work always thrives in.
The result is the best new musical I’ve seen this year. That may not be much of an accolade when some of the others have been Cry-Baby and Gone with the Wind, but though I’ve also loved the audacity and vivacity of shows like Passing Strange and The Adding Machine, this show is both immediately more accessible and tuneful than either of those.
The Visit has had an unlucky history till now - Angela Lansbury was originally attached to it when it was heading to Broadway some years ago, but then she had to withdraw when her husband fell ill and subsequently died. It was put back on track via a production in 2001 at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, but then 9/11 intervened and its further life was put on hold. But now, with Chita Rivera back on board in the key role of Claire Zachanassian and George Hearn as the former lover she returns to get revenge on, it’s time has come around again - as it has for both actors. How many musicals have major lead roles for actors well into their 70s? I hope that both they and the musical itself will travel beyond their current home at Arlington VA’s Signature Theatre. But I’m certainly glad to have travelled there to see it.
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