Kit Kat Club's 'Cabaret' comes to IU tonight

Wilkommen. Bienvenue. Welcome.\nStep inside the Kit Kat Club, where scantily clad men and women are here to serve you. Watch them entertain as your host narrates the stories of love, loss, poverty and politics.\nWelcome to "Cabaret."\nTonight the IU Auditorium will transform into dark, seedy 1920s Berlin and audience members will enter a club where nothing is what it seems. The touring company of the Roundabout Theatre Company's reinvention of the 1966 Broadway and 1973 film version of "Cabaret" comes to IU for two shows beginning tonight at 8 p.m.\n"Cabaret" combines the history of its fictional characters with the story of Germany at the beginning of the Nazi era. In the musical, American writer Cliff Bradshaw is entranced by the decadence and immorality of the Kit Kat Club, particularly its star player, Sally Bowles. The show combines Cliff's and Sally's story with that of Sally's middle-aged landlady, Fraulein Schneider, who is embarking on a relationship with Herr Schultz. The show is presented to the audience like a real cabaret act, and numbers from the fictional Kit Kat Club complement and comment on what is going on with the characters off the stage.\nJohn Holley plays Cliff, a character he said starts out "excited" to be in Germany and ends up "really emotionally and physically worn out." Holley said one of his favorite parts of the show is how the story of the characters, the cabaret and the country come together.\n"One of my favorite parts of the show -- and I'm not even onstage -- is with the old couple when he is talking to her about getting married," he said. "Halfway through the song, the lights change and a mirrorball comes down and you're transported into the club, where they are singing the same song in German. It's really magical and cool how that happens. The constant interweaving of the stories that goes on is a really great dynamic of the show and is achieved even more with this revival."\nThe version of "Cabaret" IU audiences will see is a combination of the original musical, the movie and the imagination of director Sam Mendes, who helmed the revival on Broadway in 1998. In a 1999 interview from the "Cabaret" tour's Web site, Mendes said the revival, which is presented in New York with audiences seated (and treated) like actual regulars at the Kit Kat Club, purposely tries to capture the dark world of 1920s Berlin.\n"It was about creating the atmosphere of a rough club, about being historically accurate to the period, about treating the music in a very rough, improvisational way," Mendes said.\nSome of the ways the company makes this happen night to night is an orchestra made of the cast members, people who portray the individual personalities of the "Cabaret boys" and the "Cabaret girls," while also playing saxophones, trumpets and trombones.\nNicole Swartzentruber, who plays both the saxophone and the character Frenchie in the touring production tonight, said the chance to show off her musical and theatrical talents was one thing that drew her to the show. She credits the set design, with its specially designed "band bridge" for helping her do both jobs effectively.\n"When I run up the stairs (to the bridge) and sit down I'm ready to play, and when I run down the stairs it becomes the cabaret and I become Frenchie," she said.\nIn the 1999 interview, Mendes said certain aspects of the show that change from night to night also keep it fresh.\n"The emcee has certain moments with the audience which change every night: There are certain lines that are ad-libbed and there is a sense that it is constantly evolving live performance for the people in the club," he said.\nThe cabaret is "roughed up" even further through the suggestive costumes worn by the emcee and cabaret performers. Swartzentruber appears onstage in what looks like lingerie, although she said she has gotten used to wearing it in front of a crowd of thousands every night.\n"When we first went onstage, I felt very bare, but now it feels so natural I don't even think about it," she said. "But sometimes the costume falls the wrong way, and you feel a little conspicuous."\nThis version of "Cabaret" may go out of its way to suggest certain images. But Mendes said in the 1999 interview that the way it merely hints at the historical implications of the coming of Nazism is one of its strong suits.\n"What happens is you get involved very much in the lives of these people and the very simple story, because in the end that's what it is: two love affairs set against a historical backdrop," Mendes said. "Then, gradually, the creeping menace of the Third Reich unfolds and the world that you have enjoyed being part of becomes a kind of prison."\nAlthough this is the intended feeling for the audience, the same is not true for performers. Before getting the part of Cliff, Holley monitored one of the initial auditions for the Broadway run of "Cabaret," worked at the "Cabaret" ticket office in New York and worked security at the theater where it was being performed. After all that, getting onstage is a victory.\n"I was around the show a lot, sitting backstage and listening to it," he said. "I wanted to do the show for a long time, and it was like I learned it by osmosis or something"