When Eddie Redmayne’s slithering Emcee assures the audience at “Cabaret” that “here, life is beautiful,” he’s telling a half-truth. The August Wilson Theater, done up like the Kit Kat Club for a bracing, high-style, Broadway revival that opened there Sunday, has indeed been transformed into a house of pleasure. Entering through an alley and into fancified, jam-packed lobby bars feels like discovering a speakeasy inside a nightclub.
The production is a hot-ticket escape from a city where police are breaking up student protests and a former head of state is on trial for porn-star bribery. Inside the theater, the denizens of Weimar Germany writhing around this storied den are likewise at least temporarily inured from the political perils pressing on its doors. But in director Rebecca Frecknall’s ravishing and mercilessly introspective production of the 1966 musical…
