Sean Power - Reviews & Interviews

The Three Degrees Cabaret
May 2000 - National Post:
"A certain degree of success" (by Robert Cushman)

A certain degree of success

The Three-Degree Cabaret
Tallulah's Cabaret,
Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto

BY ROBERT CUSHMAN

The word "cabaret," attractive enough to most of us, has long exercised near-hypnotic powers on earnestly minded theatre people. It starts visions of old Berlin dancing in their heads: fantasies of creating hard-hitting, highly sexed satire that will have the public enthralled and the authorities incensed. The Three-Degree Cabaret seems to be the work of people who want to do just such a show.

Unlike most cabaret, real or self-styled, it has a storyline, and this in turn seems to be about people who want to do just such a show - which could be confusing, and is.

The entertainment begins with three figures, identifiable as gangsters by their trench coats and variously coloured snapbrim trilbies, paying a call on Jimmy J. Tee the Emcee. Jimmy is, loosely speaking, our hero. He owns, runs and fronts the show-within-the-show. Naturally, he owes these hoods money, and they are here to put the moves on him. The moves they put are gymnastic, acrobatic and very neatly executed. Indeed, all the footwork in this production is both excellent and original. The choreographer is Nicola Pantin, who also makes one of the cast of five. Six, if you count the musical help, which you probably should.

Back to business: Jimmy, who of course has a show to do, manages to fend off the Mob but they take all his theatre's props as security. Next comes a sequence in which Jimmy takes three threatening phone calls, on three phones, simultaneously: one from a creditor, one from the morality squad and one from his girlfriend. Sean Power, as Jimmy, does both the physical and the verbal juggling with winning dexterity. He plays the jaded charmer with great style throughout. Words slip like butter off his tongue, which is more than they do off anyone else's.

Dancers the other performers (Sarah Martyn, Beche Ako, Paul Sun-Byung Lee) may be; actors they are not, or at least not when it comes to the nifty handling of the verbals.

It's not as if the verbals they are given are too hot to handle. They are, actually, clammy. Adam Nashman, who wrote and directed, has done interesting work in the past, but everything here is sloppy, in both style and structure. Hard-boiled turns out to mean ungrammatical. (Did I hear someone say "this phenomena"? Is that the character being illiterate or the author being careless? Does it matter? Yes.)

None of the ideas set up is followed through. The central situation - protagonist tries to keep his show running so he can pay off the crooks so he can keep his show running - served well enough in Kiss Me Kate, but it never develops any urgency here.

The performers complain about the missing props, but it doesn't seem to inhibit them any. (One of them also complains about not having a parking space. Actors.) A lady dances on, around, and under a table - it literally chases her round the stage. It's a spectacular routine, but I don't see how it could be improved by classier furniture.

The offstage girlfriend remains offstage. The morality squad does appear, in the person of a horny blackmailing nun. This scene is the only extended sequence in the piece, and its heavy-handed pointlessness is enough to make you glad of that fact. Sidelong references to homelessness and immigration appear during or between numbers, but to no effect. Anyone can be on the side of the angels. The trick is to do it with wit. The show hardly reaches the fabled level of Brecht and Weill - though neither, to be fair, did Brecht and Weill, at least not most of the time.

It's hinted Jimmy's persecutors are not from the underworld but from the social and political overworld. They're the Establishment, trying to prevent Jimmy being artistic and rebellious. It's also possible Jimmy himself is not only slippery but tainted by the very evils he opposes. He finally disposes of his opponents with unscrupulous ease. So easily in fact, you wonder why he was ever bothered. But neither the writing nor the performance takes this ambiguity very far. The most we get is a generalized air of world-weary seediness.

Very helpful, atmospherically and otherwise, is jazz musician John T. Davis, who pounds out restful, rolling blues on the electric organ, engages in occasional smoky banter with the protagonist and takes time out to hawk his new CD. He looks and sounds like he's seen everything.

Sean Power manages both physical and verbal juggling with winning dexterity.