(Intl. City Theater; 300 seats; $45 top)
Feb. 25
Christopher Carothers is the American visitor and Erin Bennett the neurotic artist in Intl. City Theater presentation of a musical in two acts with book by Joe Masteroff, based on "Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood. Every new "Cabaret" seems to strain harder to invest the Kander and Ebb musicalization of Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories" with a profound statement about the Third Reich and/or universal evil in a quasi-Brechtian style. With selected patrons seated at cafe tables to help create the notorious Kit Kat Klub, helmer Jules Aaron manipulates Don Llewellyn's boxy setpieces so the Klub keeps bleeding into the boarding/bawdy house where American visitor Clifford Bradshaw (Christopher Carothers) gets up the courage to sally forth into Berlin nightlife. Sally Bowles (Erin Bennett), becomes still more problematic when (as here) he's made more or less exclusively homosexual, including a ludicrous male-male kiss in the middle of his ballad begging Sally to stay with him and keep the baby he may have fathered.