Photo by Joan Marcus
A young, undisciplined American novelist moves to the big, sophisticated city, where he falls in love with a charming and beautiful young woman—his love blinding him to the fact that she is a prostitute. In the shadow of the memory of a terrible war, with another possibly waiting in the future, the city’s demimonde is full of intoxicant-
fueled frivolity, and the writer heartily enjoys the party until his romantic disappointment leads him to understand the moral and aesthetic nihilism at its center, and the malice closing in from its edges. That’s the Roundabout Theatre Company’s latest version of Cabaret at Studio 54: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with Nazis.
Sam Mendes continues his unpredictable career: This is a very fine production—well-acted, well-sung, well-presented—but there is something that is not quite all the way there. It’s a slap in the face when you’re expecting a punch in the belly. I half-suspect the problem may be Nazi overexposure. Nazis are the last acceptable bad guys: You’ll recall that, even in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the marshals of the commanding heights of culture could not bear to present jihadists as villains, replacing them with European neo-Nazis in The Sum of All Fears. The Indiana Jones series relied heavily on Nazi villains, along with everything from Robert Harris’s pulp novels to computer games such as Wolfenstein: The New Order. Nazis are excellent to root against and to blow to
