Eall about that Cabaret is tall. Kander and Ebb’s original take in creating such a dark and jagged musical experience. The gifts and reputation of the two stars – Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne. Director Rebecca Frecknall and designer Tom Scutt’s ambition to take the action beyond the stage, transforming one of London’s most traditional theaters with proscenium and gilding into a manky pique: the Kit Kat Club in 1930s Berlin. Oh, and the ticket prices.

Walking down the stone steps (all plush spent) the audience meets provocative looks, lacy camisoles, suspenders, Doc Martens, glittery eyeshadows, accordion players behind beaded curtains , pelvic grinding in the bar. Neither here nor on stage is there much mirth, despite the glam-schlock, the hustle and bustle of faux fur and satin and chiffon. There is never much doubt about the direction of the evening. The host of Redmayne does not preside over the rise of fascism so much as it embodies its core. Sometimes dressed in clown pants and a casual conical hat, sometimes letting his bare chest multitask, his muscles vying for domination, he is often savage – a new type of fantasy beast – and often as a fairground creation. .

Buckley, meanwhile, as Sally Bowles, is never less than human. In a bo-peep beanie and a slightly crumpled square, she is frank, and never more than in singing. She makes each of her numbers an individual drama – she must, you think, have written them herself: the title song is spewed out with personal pain and cosmic sarcasm. Maybe this time is broken, her voice narrowed by the difficulty of believing in romantic hope.

The unexpected center of desire is the love story between the old landlady (Liza Sadovy) and her German-Jewish tenant (Elliot Levey), both acting with restrained melancholy. Who would have thought that so much naughty tenderness could be conveyed by handing over a pineapple?

This is a great achievement and breakthrough for Frecknall and for Scutt – the occasion in which two major talents are widely recognized – although I find the more modest work that both have done elsewhere more touching of imagination. Redmayne approached Frecknall with the idea of ​​directing Cabaret, after admiring his superb production of Tennessee Williams Summer and smoke three years ago.

There is an obvious irony in swallowing champagne while watching a musical about precariousness, decadence, inflation and the rise of fascism; it is, I think, exaggerated to see the semi-complicity of the public as another ring of the immersive experience. There is a near paradox in the way that bridging, day-to-day, and provocative existences take on a sparkling magnificence: a danger of bare feet looking monumental. Sometimes the splendor of the spectacle detracts from its danger of bad taste.

James Graham’s exciting new play, co-produced by Young Vic with Headlong, rushes audiences like a news hunter after a story. The best of enemies takes hold of a seemingly niche event, making it appear essential to understanding American history and shedding light on Britain’s current position. Based on a documentary by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, the drama is partly a textual recreation of the 1968 televised debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, representatives of the right and left in America, and partly a reconstruction imagined from the circumstances surrounding them.

The two patrician intellectuals discuss Reagan and Nixon and Vietnam and whether freedom breeds inequality; they lean back in their chairs, gifting their audience with their language and ingrained hostility. They are fast, funny and fluid, but gradually the egoism and the pressure for the ratings which motivated the programs pushes them to personal insult, reducing their arguments. In a vicious and puny feud, Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley calls Vidal a queer. Welcome to today’s poison barracks.

It’s an actor’s party. As Vidal, Charles Edwards is deftly posed, both stretched out and tense; David Harewood’s Buckley is a wonderful contradiction, his body as relaxed as if it were stretching after a huge tennis match, his hyperactive face (as it was in life), his tongue sticking out like a lizard, the mouth that swivels to the side. Harewood is – like Buckley was not – black, and his casting turns out to be a masterstroke: he makes you hear every word of reactionary again. Never more than when he’s on stage with the finely thoughtful Syrus Lowe who, like James Baldwin, is the consciousness of the play.

The best of enemies is supremely concerned with celebrating verbal correctness, but Jeremy Herrin’s galvanic output hits the center of things before a word is spoken. Above the area where the men clash, Bunny Christie hung large screens, which display archival footage, and also become the booths for TV executives. These screens dominate the debates, just as TV shenanigans began to dominate the real debate – and two smart men became celebrity antagonists.

In 1957, Alice Childress, a founding member of the American Negro Theater, was to be the first black woman to perform a Broadway play. The producers asked for various changes; She refused; the staging did not take place. This room was Problem in mind, which captures Childress’s own experience. A white director stages a play about a lynching. The roles of the predominantly black cast consist of maids and the murdered man, “simple people,” the director says. All must be passive; the actors assault their roles by swinging their palms apart. A woman protests, demanding a little realism, although she knows that “whites cannot stand unhappy negroes”. The director says he can’t sell that kind of realism to his producers.

Childress died in 1994; A longtime activist, she probably wouldn’t have been surprised at how little this power dynamic has changed. It might not be a scorching night out – Nancy Medina’s production moves a little too stiff at times – but Tanya Moodie is impressive throughout: an unwavering force that comes to glory in the streak. closing the room. Left alone, she pushes a huge platform onto the front of the stage, as if about to support the world like Atlas. Climbing on top of it, she listens to the canned applause first, then opens her arms to the audience in front of her, who greet her with the real thing. A nice moment of theatrical alchemy.

Ratings (out of five)
Cabaret ??
The best of enemies ??
Problem in mind ??

• Cabaret is at the Playhouse, London, until October 1, 2022 (new cast after March 21)

• The best of enemies is at Young Vic, London, until January 22, 2022

• Problem in mind is at the Dorfman, National Theater, London, until January 29, 2022