Maude Apatow, the 25-year-old daughter of Hollywood director Judd and actress Leslie Mann, and star of TV series Euphoria, gets to the heart of Sally the imposter: she’s a punk child, a posh little girl playing bohemian dress-up. Apatow’s wry, husky drawl has a touch of Princess Anne about it, but she’s also capable of heart-stopping vulnerability in Maybe This Time, and manic, jarring passion in the mighty title number.
Wonderful too are Beverley Klein and Teddy Kempner as late-in-life paramours Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz. Their courtship is both impossibly tender and genuinely sensual: his careful placing of a pineapple in her bag is somehow more erotic than anything else on stage, and that includes a man in a gimp mask, a baguette extracted from a writhing dancer, and a flash of bare buttocks from the Emcee.
As the pragmatic survivor Schneider wrestles with the danger of marrying a Jewish man in an increasingly Nazi-dominated society, her number What Would You Do? – which Klein tears from the soul – feels like a furious challenge to us all. With war in Europe once again, it’s no longer such a hypothetical question. Nathan Ives-Moiba is sweetly sensitive as visiting American (and cautiously queer) writer Cliff, while Danny Mahoney is such a jolly, bluff Ernst Ludwig that the reveal of his political affiliation draws a huge gasp.
But then every element of Frecknall’s production is a wow: the sumptuous pre-show entertainment, Tom Scutt’s detailed design, Julia Cheng’s sinuous choreography, Isabella Byrd’s exquisite lighting, and the vital live band (“even the orchestra is beautiful!”). Regardless of whoever plays the Emcee and Sally – and next up is the pop duo of Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears and Self Esteem – this production is, and will remain, an absolute knockout. With its combination of all-encompassing decadent beauty and thunderous moral force, there’s simply nothing else in town quite like it.
Currently booking to Jun 29
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKyYmq61vsRorqGZpGLBsHnSnpxom5GXrrOx02anpZmpnby2v8Rmq6Gdkam%2FpnnRnq2inadiuqLBw55kmqiRqby4ew%3D%3D