akhoya87 said: "I went to see this last night - both Adam and Auli'i were in, although there were quite a few post-Thanksgiving outs (Bebe among them).Some thoughts:
Adam as Emcee: Adam is my fourth emcee -- I've also seen Eddie, Fra, and a cover in London whose name I unfortunately can't recall. Adam was the most libertine of the emcees in Act One. I find it fascinating that they've given him more license than other emcees to ad lib and go off book. ("It's the earlobes" is gone, and there's a lot more audience banter.) There are small touches that I liked about Adam's performance. For example, to the extent that Adam is supposed to be stand-in for the Weimar everyman, I found the slow descent into complicity and conformance with the Third Reich fascinating.
That said, Adam wasn't menacing like other Emcees. In Act II, I feel like his "I Don't Care Much," and his introduction of Sally pre-Cabaret lacked the emotion that I've seen in other Emcees. It's almost as if he descends into a quiet resignation, which doesn't work for me as a choice.
Auli'i as Sally: I'm going to cut her some slack, because I'm sure she's exhausted from the Moana 2 press tour. She has incredibly powerful vocals, and was far more seductive, IMO, than Gayle was as Sally. But her Cabaret didn't do it for me. There was no break, no fall from fragility like I've seen in other Sallys like Amy Lennox, Emily Benjamin, or Gayle. I felt nothing when she proclaimed, "When I go, I'll go like Elsie." I also found her delivery of "I've always rather hated Paris" rather flat; Gayle, for example, delivered the line heartbreakingly. Part of me wonders whether there's a directional issue -- the Sally that she should be playing (younger, more naive, inexperienced) is not the Sally of Amy or Gayle, yet I felt like Auli'i was trying to be like them, in some ways. Again, maybe she just has to get back into the swing of things after having been on the press tour for so long.
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In summary, Fra Fee and Amy Lennox are still my favorite Emcee/Sally duo. Adam and Auli'i are definitely worth watching because they bring a fresh take in some aspects, but not the strongest version of this production I've seen so far. I'll go again in January or February (hopefully it lasts that long) to see if Auli'i grows back into the role."
Really interesting reading your thoughts here! I had also seen Adam and Auli'i this past Tuesday and thought they breathed new life into the role (before that I had seen Eddie/Gayle and also Fra/Amy, though the latter was my first time ever seeing Cabaret so I'm afraid I don't remember too much about their interpretations). But I had a slightly different interpretation of how they played the characters (and I recognize that some of it might be projecting things that they didn't necessarily intend, but that's theater for you).
I saw Adam's Emcee as being a queer man who slowly realizes that he must assimilate and hide those parts of himself to survive the oncoming tide of fascism. I think the first moment was in the end of Tomorrow Belongs to Me when he pulls out what I think is his final wig from a box at the end and looks at it with such a quiet state of devastation because he knows that that's what he has to do to fit in. Fwiw, I don't actually remember Eddie OR Fra doing this, but it's been a while since I saw either of them. What I do remember is thinking the circle of toy soldiers with Eddie's Emcee was a bit too on the nose in regards to the future militarization of the Nazi party and Germany overall, especially since Eddie's Emcee was kind of representing a general malevolent force that swept across the people of Germany, but with Adam's Emcee I saw the Emcee more as an actual person who's being surrounded by forces he cannot control and backed into a corner.
Adam's "conducting" of the Tomorrow Belongs with Me reprise felt almost like he was the one being puppeted rather than the one doing the puppeting and I thought the ending of I Don't Care Much was devastating--the entire song being him trying to convince himself it doesn't matter only to almost break at the end and needing Sally to comfort him. And the monotone announcing of Sally's return to the Kit Kat Club, that was heartbreaking. His final costume in the suit also felt so ill-fitting (on purpose) because it didn't represent who he truly wanted to be, whereas on Eddie he still had a bit of a sinister edge that it seemed that the malignant force he was projecting had just taken on a different form.
I thought it was really interesting seeing Auli'i as Sally since I mostly knew her as Moana and just couldn't really envision her as Sally, but I thought she did a fantastic job. I found the idea of her being technically a person of color, but mostly white-passing, really fascinating in how the role came off to me. I thought the lead-in to Maybe This Time held more weight because it seemed like for the first time she was being seen fully as a person and taken seriously rather than just an exotic plaything due to her mixed race, especially playing opposite a black Cliff (side bar: I don't know that I can fully buy a black Cliff still with regards to his interactions with Ernst, but I did like Calvin Leon Smith a lot more than Ato Blankson-Wood). I think in the current cast Sally found a bit more kinship with Cliff which made their relationship easier to believe, and their breakup more impactful too--if Cliff sees Sally as another person of color, then he would think it fairly obvious that they should both flee Germany as soon as possible, whereas Sally, who is able to pass for white in a way that Cliff is not, would still be enticed to stay where she can still bask in the fame and attention she gets.
I think this is maybe why her performance of Cabaret comes off so differently. She's not breaking down as much as making a decision that she's going to be resolute about. She's discovered that Cliff is not all that similar to her after all and that despite how much she may love him, their relationship would never fully work and she believes she can still survive going about as she always has in the Kit Kat Club. And it also makes her friendship with the Emcee more apparent too. They're both people who don't quite fit into the "approved" social strata, but can choose to hide parts of themselves to fit in once the Nazi regime takes over--which is demonstrated all the more by the ending.
Anyways, all this to say that I definitely saw new and different layers in the current cast that hadn't occurred to me before, so I'd still recommend anyone who might be on the fence because of the original casting to take another look! I think Adam's Emcee is a lot more of a human character rather than an abstract concept, and Auli'i's Sally brought out more of her internal struggles and calculated choices than I remember. And Calvin Leon Smith's chemistry with Auli'i and in general the other characters was much more believable than before.
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