Visual imagination gives new life to ‘Cabaret’

Then there’s the challenge an audience faces in trying to squelch memories of the 1972 movie version.

Most film adaptations of Broadway musicals are forgettable or worse, but director Bob Fosse chose to radically rework the material, and in so doing he created one of those rare, indelible classics that throws a long shadow on subsequent stage productions. (Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey helped. A lot.)

If Trinity Repertory Company’s “Cabaret’’ does not escape that shadow, it’s not for lack of directorial ingenuity by artistic director Curt Columbus.

Columbus deploys finesse and visual imagination in his production, helping this “Cabaret’’ to mostly overcome the shortcomings of Joe Masteroff’s book, a lack of chemistry between the two romantic leads, a cast with varying levels of vocal proficiency, and, believe it or not, a couple of sluggish songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb.

There are, of course, a number of marvelous songs as well, several of which are sung by Joe Wilson Jr. as the androgynous, leering Emcee who presides over the decadent doings at the Kit Kat Klub in 1930s Berlin. From Wilson’s jovial-yet-sinister “Willkommen’’ through his renditions of “Two Ladies,’’ “The Money Song,’’ and “If You Could See Her,’’ this “Cabaret’’ gains vitality whenever the Emcee is onstage and loses it whenever he is off.

Inside the club, it’s all fun and games, Weimar-style, a constant carnival of lewd song, dance, and cross-dressing. But outside the club, the storm clouds of Nazism are gathering. Soon enough that storm will move inside.

One evening, the Kit Kat audience includes an American writer named Clifford Bradshaw (Mauro Hantman). Bradshaw has come to Berlin in search of “something to write about,’’ but he is sometimes lured away from his typewriter by Ernst Ludwig (Stephen Thorne), a mysterious businessman involved in some shadowy activities.

A flamboyant young British singer named Sally Bowles (Rachael Warren) bursts onstage, singing “Don’t Tell Mama’’ while accompanied by an ensemble bedecked in nun’s wimples, black brassieres, and black garters. Bradshaw is beguiled by Sally, and he wows her by reciting some poetry (not Keats or Shelley, but “Casey at the Bat’’). He’s not really prepared for her to show up at his door, much less for her to announce that she’s moving in. But she does, and the two become lovers.

Among their rooming house neighbors is Fraulein Kost (Janice Duclos), a prostitute who bestows her favors on a succession of German sailors (whom she identifies to the prim rooming house proprietor as her “cousins’’). Meanwhile, said proprietor, Fraulein Schneider (Phyllis Kay), is conducting a discreet romance with Herr Schultz (Stephen Berenson), a kindly Jewish grocer.

Fosse’s movie revised and compressed this subplot while retaining enough of it to dramatize the human stakes of the dreadful events about to occur in Germany. The filmmaker had the right idea, because the Schneider-Schultz romance, while touching, slows down the show. Moreover, while Kay is a skilled actress, the same cannot be said of her singing during the four numbers on which she either solos or duets with Berenson (who has a fine, ringing voice).

As Sally, Warren displays the requisite flapper sprightliness, but the sparks don’t really fly between her and Hantman’s Bradshaw. Sally and Cliff are meant to be a mismatched pair, but the audience should nonetheless feel that she is an irresistible force who overcomes his immovable object, that they succumb to a kind of temporary insanity, and we don’t feel that forcefully enough.

Hantman and Warren do sing well, though, and the latter nails her rendition of the title tune. Nonetheless, the most memorable song of “Cabaret’’ is the double-edged, shiver-inducing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.’’ It is performed twice, first as a soaring expression of youthful optimism and then as a chilling expression of Nazi ascendancy, with Ernst (by then wearing a swastika armband) and Fraulein Kost leading the stomping, clapping ensemble.

As with the rest of the action of “Cabaret,’’ this production number unfolds before a large wooden arch. Though the arch was originally constructed for Trinity Rep’s production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,’’ it creates an image that has resonance for “Cabaret,’’ with its right column leaning toward the audience like a civilization on the verge of collapse.

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.