Come on now: shove on your feather boa, arch an eyebrow, put a puss on your lips and stick a cigarette holder through them! Pretending to the "decadence" of the Weimar era without an awareness of the context that made it political is a bore. That decadence is history, and so are The Sex Pistols, who tried to use sexuality to rock the system, just like Kurt Weill; so is glam rock, which brought the anarchic theatrical mask to pop, just as Weill brought it to the musical.
Gavin Friday, the glam-punk veteran, seems to know he can't close the distance between us and the Weimar songs, because ours is an era in which sex has lost its sting. Instead of trying to obscure the fact with ostrich feathers and cigarette smoke, he cleverly exposes it by asking a woman when she lost her virginity. At 16, she says. There isn't even a frisson. When The Virgin Prunes were in operation, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, sex was the Semtex that could blow the State to pieces, and even in the Blue Jaysus Cabaret, in a grimy dockland warehouse in the mid-1980s, Friday could make Weill sound anarchic. He can't do that now, but he can still make us remember how it was.
For two hours he shimmies, dances, gesticulates and gyrates with the music. His voice lacks reach but oozes passion. In some of the Weimar songs, there is too little voice to counter the pumping percussion, but against the lush soundscapes created by the band for the later work, he makes the words speak. And what a band. Friday's faithful collaborator, Maurice Seezer, pushes the piano from romance to the tinny tinkling of a cabaret hall; Michael Blair brings the percussion to the back and to the front of the sound; Des Moore shivers, strums and picks on mandolin, banjo and guitar. Gary Hughes on bass and Renaud Pion on saxophone swell out the sound.
The second star of the night is, however, Julia Palmer, astride her cello like a witch on a broom, bringing a beautiful, dramatic, banshee-like soprano to contrast with Friday; their rendition of Alabama Song is extraordinary.
A formal big band, they mostly stay in their places, against Paul Keogan's jewel-coloured lighting. They reference cabaret rather than trying to be one. This is a production that knows its limitations, and within them is compelling.
Runs until Sunday
