Here is what area reviewers have been saying about The Village Theatre's production of Cabaret, now open in Issaquah until July 3:
Simply put, Cabaret is one of the best productions I’ve ever seen at Village Theatre. - Issaquah Press
Matthew Smucker’s decoratively cluttered set is ingenious and eye-filling. - Seattle Weekly
Cabaret easily takes home the award for visuals. If No Way To Treat a Lady’s set design was notable for clean, cartoonish minimalism, Cabaret’s is a maximalist, textured (and literally textual) feast of stuff. The Kit Kat Klub is a womb of light and motion crowded on all sides by the scraps, swastikas, posters, propaganda and news clippings of the Nazi era in Germany. This theme creeps into scene changes: Bradshaw’s apartment wall is a page from the show’s original source novel Goodbye to Berlin. The obsession with paper ephemera works powerfully as a visual metaphor for black-and-white reality creeping in on the characters’ delusions. - Bellevue Reporter
As we walk into the theatre, Matthew Smucker's brilliant set is in disarray. Brian Earp as Cliff walks in and, as the Kurt Weill-like strains of "Willkommen" start to vamp under him, we see that he is an older, wiser Cliff, returned to the vestiges of his youthful playground. Suddenly, the broken "Cabaret" sign starts to rise, and is realigned, and before you know it, we are back in 1930s Germany, though Smucker (within Yorkey's framework) has already aced his task, with that disheveled opening tableau being as masterful as the opening tableau Boris Aaronson designed, in a likewise deserted theatre, for the original Broadway version of Follies. - Talkin' Broadway
