The Goodspeed delivers a bewildering benign and cowardly ‘Cabaret’

Life may be a cabaret, old chum, but life is what’s lacking in the “Cabaret” at the Goodspeed Opera House.

A calm “Cabaret” at the Goodspeed Opera House should not come as a shock. While many of the musicals that Goodspeed Musicals has workshopped at its festivals and Norma Terris Theater have been challenging, contemporary and cutting edge, the mainstays of the mainstage season are family-friendly classic musical fare. This bewildering benign “Cabaret” is strikingly similar to a decidedly non-horrific “Sweeney Todd” that the Goodspeed attempted in 1996.

This is the tamest, least objectionable, least menacing and thus most useless “Cabaret” imaginable. With some musicals, turning down the intensity makes sense, but when you’re dramatizing a seismic shift in society, including the rise of the Nazi party and a revolutionary art movement, soft-pedaling isn’t just a style choice, it’s insulting.

How wrong-headed is it? It takes a song designed to offend, “If You Could See Her,” in which the Emcee professes his love for a dancing gorilla, and drops the gorilla costume in favor of making the lover a rag doll — which not only makes no sense but upholds hoary old subservient woman stereotypes. It takes numbers inspired by actual Berlin cabaret styles of the 1920s — intentionally odd, angular and Expressionistic — and renders them as if they were British or American flapper dances from musicals like “The Boyfriend” or “Thoroughly Modern Millie.”

How are these cutesy foxtrots supposed to illustrate a country teetering out of control? Instead of continuing in the dire unsettled mood of pre-intermission, the opening of the second act is rousing and almost comical.

The sets are colorful and clean, not seedy as you might expect. The band plays more like swinging jazz that Kurt Weill. There’s nothing disorienting, in a show where disorientation is the main theme.

As you might expect, the Emcee here (Jelani Remy) isn’t threatening or leering. Dressed clownishly rather than creepily in a top hat and glittery vest, he’s more like a regular Emcee hosting a variety show, except that in this version he doesn’t even get the last word, wandering in and out of the proceeding with no pronounced purpose. Aline Mayagoitia’s Sally Bowles has none of the recklessness that role requires. She’s just brazen, not wild, and sings so sweetly and conventionally (in a role that 1998 revival decided should not be cast with a skilled vocalist, to demonstrate Sally’s limitations and delusions as a cabaret performer) that the joke lines in “Don’t Tell Mama” and the show’s title song are close to incomprehensible and pack no punch.

Even the smaller roles are diminished. The chorus girls don’t double as a band, as they’re said to in the intro, and don’t distinguish themselves as individuals, even though they’re introduced that way.

In this environment, which makes pre-war Germany seem unacceptably normal and civilized, the two settled older characters, Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, strangely take on greater importance. With everyone subdued, Schneider and Schultz at least have a genuine love story to play out, and Jennifer Smith and Kevin Ligon give an old-school melodramatic musical comedy tone. Again, off-base for “Cabaret,” but fun on its own terms.

Almost every famous musical has one version that dwarfs the rest One that is so resonant that all others either ape or try to consciously avoid. For most, from “Hello, Dolly!” to “Rent,” it’s the original Broadway production. For some like “Jesus Christ Superstar,” there’s isn’t a single defining version. For “Cabaret,” there are three, all equally imposing and influential: the original 1966 Broadway one with Joel Grey as the Emcee; the 1972 Bob Fosse film version which eschewed Robbin’s vision for its own style; and the radical 1993 rethinking by London’s Donmar Warehouse which led to the 1998 Broadway revival, both starring Alan Cumming and laying on the Nazi menace very thickly.

If the Goodspeed’s lackluster version could be said to be in the thrall of any of these three iconic, it would be the Fosse one, since permission was granted by the Fosse estate to recreate the choreography for a single song from the movie, “Mein Herr.” The song originated in the movie and hadn’t appeared in “Cabaret” previously, so using Fosse’s original staging makes some sense. It’s also an choice for several reasons: “Mein Herr” is not a particularly important song in terms of plot or character. Without the film’s distinctive camera angle, it looks very different. On stage, it will mostly make you think of similar (and better) routines from Fosse’s “Chicago.” As you can imagine, a Fosse routine sticks out like a sore thumb amid all the serviceable though not spectacular dances staged by the show’s main choreographer Lainie Sakakura. Despite being associated with just one number in the production, Bob Fosse gets by far the longest biographical blurb in the playbill.

The show this “Cabaret” hews closest to is the 1950s play this 1960s musical was based on, “I Am a Camera” by John Van Druten, a loose adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s novel “Goodbye to Berlin,” which fictionalized Isherwood’s adventures in Berlin during the social upheaval leading up to Nazi leadership and World War II. The various adaptations take liberties that push them in various storytelling directions. In “Cabaret,” for instance, the male lead character, Cliff, is American and bisexual, rather than British and gay as Isherwood wrote.

This may be an unconvincing “Cabaret,” a clipped-wings “Cabaret,” but it’s still recognizable as “Cabaret,” and the choices it makes based on the show’s history and traditions are interesting even if the exercise as a whole is misguided. A “Cabaret” that doesn’t shock, dismay or inform is one big “Why bother?”

Cabaret runs through July 3 at the Goodspeed Opera House, 6 Main St., East Haddam. Performances are Wednesday and Thursday at 2 and 7:30 p.m., Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 3 and 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 and 6:30 p.m. Tickets are $30-$81. goodspeed.org.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.