Broken Cabaret - Something Something Lazarus

Broken Cabaret: Something Something Lazarus

Broken Cabaret - Something Something LazarusSomething Something Lazarus, a title you always have to confirm is the actual title whenever you talk about it, is ostensibly a musical, but one which interrupts its form.  The show is structured around the Midnight Sun, an ailing cabaret club, and a setting much like the King’s Head venue it takes place in. The rehearsals of songs about something (resurrection, for example), become a hyper-symbolic dreamscape where the singing of the song is the action itself. (Say, raising the dead. For example.) The music is intrinsic to the characters and their interactions, it is their language and does more than sound pleasing – as much as dance is more than just movement and tells more than a story. Unlike a traditional musical Lazarus seeks to disrupt narrative, and neat segues, and present something confrontational.

Much of the music is almost-familiar and, like all good cabaret, highly referential. It felt like the headliner should be a jaded, ageing drag artist to truly embody the spirit of the place. The eponymous broken cabaret itself (performed inside sugar-daddy club-owner Daniel’s head) is akin to Jonathan Larson or John Cameron Mitchell as directed by David Lynch, and complimentary Elaine Paige stickers adorn the patron’s chests. So much of Something Something Lazarus, when it moves on from the slightly stilted realism of the introductory scene, feels like someone trying to scratch an idea out of their head, like a composer noodling on their piano, an artist furiously sketching pages and tearing each one off onto a pile on the floor, already scribbling on the next clean sheet with the impressions of the one before scarring the paper, and as young agitator Jay tells us when a scene doesn’t quite go to plan ‘this is cabaret. If you wanted the Royal Court you should have fucking gone there.’ Quite.

It does take too long to get going, to launch into its main conceit, but once it does I was consistently thrilled.  The set pieces and narrative devices are maybe not as innovative as the company might like to think, but they are compellingly executed. The majority of the music is performed by the cast and the arrangements and musical direction are the true strength of Something Something Lazarus and the element that really sets it apart from its contemporaries. Setting a show inside a character’s head allows for philosophical abstraction. Using time as a structuring device and conveying it in literal and metaphorical ways, yes these are things we have seen, things which work – but what really elevates this play, and the sometimes carelessly written dialogue, is the way music saturates every interaction. You know the way a song can make you feel like you’re in a story, the swell of possibility in your chest as you listen to something that speaks to you? Here that singular and personal experience is made manifest and accessible as a shared moment – a liminal moment, stretched out beyond the seconds it occurs for and into the virtual. Despite the tension of the narrative, when the full company perform an ever-escalating, passion-revealing number together, it borders on euphoric.

The raw aspects, carefully orchestrated though most of them are, feel honest despite the subterfuge and the encyclopaedia of unspoken tensions and resentments and loves and disappointments. The character who seems the most superficial and vain transpires to be the most emotionally developed in a world where, as the song tells us ‘Every heart ends up as meat.’

However, the artifice of the production is paradoxically highlighted by the life given to the characters outside of the tiny back room of the King’s Head. The world of the Midnight Sun extends far beyond the scope of that humid performance space into the potentially infinite online.  In a concept they’ve ambitiously dubbed ‘transmedia’, Broken Cabaret have given their production a presence in the real (virtual) world. Their characters have personas, on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, the club has a fully functional website. To the producers this seems to be the most important facet of what sets Lazarus apart, and while that additional dimension was definitely entertaining, the production certainly stands without it. Which is fortunate as it seemed a number of the audience, certainly on the night I attended, were not aware of the wealth of supplementary online material.

The climactic musical number, a multilayered, multi-instrumental tennis match, Duelling Banjos with lives at stake, is funny and fraught and musically accomplished and honestly everything I could want from cabaret.  From the first note of this song I was rapt.  It was supported by a brilliant lighting design that created depth in a few square feet of floor and made judicious use of strobe. The isolated but perfectly pitched instances of choreography complemented the themes of time and control – and the escalation of both drama and musicality – faultlessly. The sparing use of clearly choreographed movement is a mature and effective choice and when the cast are transfigured into ticking automata before spiralling into something far more primal, it is rightly rewarding.

My only real criticism is that the show ends so abruptly. That jagged edge needs either polishing or sharpening somehow. I don’t think Something Something Lazarus has quite arrived yet, but it is undoubtedly going somewhere and I’ll be back to see it happen.

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About Sophie London

Sophie London is built on Film Theory and Theatre Practice. She has been a theatre technician and some time stage manager for the last decade, working on everything from one woman shows in subterranean sweatboxes to Olivier-winning West End musicals. She always comes back to Fringe and new writing though. Sophie periodically lends her services as a Marketing type to Theatre Royal Stratford East. Find her on Twitter @solosays