Kit Kat Kutups

Cabaret is a whale of a production and a minnow of a show. It is a musical built on the oozing decadence of 1930 Berlin, and is itself a form of decadence, a victory of surface over substance.

Like most musicals, the show has many fathers. Christopher Isherwood wrote the plot first as a novella, Goodbye to Berlin. John van Druten adapted it in the 1951 Broadway hit I Am a Camera, with Julie Harris playing Heroine Sally Bowles, a girl as wispy, wayward and vulnerable as the smoke at the end of her jaunty cigarette holder. A still different set of foster parents put their mark on Cabaret. It is a montage of the bloatedly satiric cartoons of George

Grosz, the sardonic sadomasochism of Bertolt Brecht, the tinkling melancholic musical style of Kurt Weill, and the plumpish, thigh-bared, black-gartered allure of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Add a living link to the period in Weill's widow, Actress Lotte Lenya, with her cynical eyes and big-city-scarred voice. Set this musical by committee in a chic-sleazy nightspot called the Kit Kat Klub, supply a rouged M.C. played with androgynous guile by Joel Grey, bring on hip-roiling, braless chorines with soft-boiled smiles and any kind of love for sale, orchestrate it all to the flesh tones of insinuative tenor saxes, and the atmosphere is complete. It's as vivid and sexy as aboriginal sin.

But a binding is not a book, and the book has been lost in transit. The "I" of Isherwood's Berlin camera was the author himself, intelligent, sentient, an amused and ironic observer of a society in vortex. The "I" (Bert Convy) of Cabaret is a gaping boy tourist with a typewriter. In the Isherwood-Van Druten versions, Sally Bowles focused the disorder around her in personal disorientation, sex-sipped sorrow, pleasure-bent pain. The part is beyond the technique and temperament of Jill Haworth. Sally is a mixture of waif and wanton, gin and gallantry; Actress Haworth is a tin-tongued ingenue.

The least credible presumption of Cabaret is that the dance floor of the Kit Kat Klub portrays a civilization goose-stepping its way to disaster. If the Kit Kat Klubs fostered Hitler, whatever will the Bunnies spawn?

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