Cabaret

The road version of John Kander and Fred Ebb's classic musical Cabaret recently played the Fox Theatre, where it was a strange victim of its own success. Cabaret, with its Brecht/Weill-esque score and modest, sordid doomed romances, is the most intimate and melancholy of musical comedies. In the glamorous, vaulting Fox, it was simply too small for the space. Imagine an enormous red-satin Valentine box with a single, gorgeous, chocolate-covered razor blade in the center. Still, Joely Fisher made a splendid Sally, bubbly and obliviously manipulative. Happily she mostly kept the Vegas-isms out of her vocal repertoire. Ambiguously gendered Emcee (Jon Peterson) was thoroughly appealing -- tough and fey, and exulting in the most glorious chorines ever: the Kit Kat Girls. Any musical that requires the to chorus smoke and smirk through their numbers gets an A+ from this department, and only when the Girls were onstage was the space well filled indeed.