Written by Joe Masteroff with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, Cabaret originally opened on Broadway in 1966. Since then it has been brought back twice in two Broadway revivals and made into a movie by Bob Fosse staring Liza Minnelli. For those unfamiliar with the musical, the story centers on Cliff Bradshaw. Cliff, an American, is a would-be writer who goes to Berlin during the 1930s to seek inspiration for his writing. On the way there he is befriended by a disingenuous German named Ernst Ludwig and rents a room from an older woman named Fraulein Schneider. On his first night, he meets a young English woman named Sally Bowles, a performer at the seedy Kit Kat Club. Another boarder at the rooming house is Herr Schultz, an elderly Jewish fruit vendor. When Sally's relationship with the Kit Kat Club owner ends, she is both jobless and homeless. Her solution is to persuade Cliff to let her share his room. A romance ensues between her and Cliff, as well as one between Schneider and Schultz.

The specter of Nazism pervades the show in the guise of the Kit Kat Club and its Master of Ceremonies. Seduced by the hedonism and loose sexuality found at the club, Cliff and Sally are oblivious to the growing control of the Nazis. Living a more proper life, Schneider and Schultz also initially discount and ignore the growing influence of the Nazis. In the end, the overshadowing evil dooms both couples.

Bradley Greenwald consumes this delicious avatar of decadence in Frank Theatre's production of "Cabaret" at the Centennial Showboat in St. Paul. Less creepy than Joel Grey's original, Greenwald's Emcee is funny and charming -- insouciantly poking fun at himself and his club mates. Sexy, dangerous chorus girls and rouged, dandy chorus boys all respond to his prompt.

With Greenwald at the center, the Kit Kat Klub musical numbers dominate Wendy Knox's staging. Music director Michael Croswell and choreographer Bonnie Zimering Bottoms create the palette, and Knox squeezes more flesh and bone onto the small Showboat stage than seems possible. Kathy Kohl's costumes serve a dual purpose, festooning these oddballs and turning them into human scenery.

Director Wendy Knox, opening her theater's 22nd season with performances on the Minnesota Centennial Showboat, offers an intentionally scruffy-looking production of the dark Kander and Ebb musical set in Germany near the end of the Weimar Republic. Inside the Kit Kat Club, there's a sense of forced, almost desperate gaiety as showgirls bump and grind in torn stockings and tired expressions and the boys cavort, rouged and hard-eyed. This isn't the stylized, heroin-chic look of the Broadway revival that played the Twin Cities in 1999. Rather than dancing as hard as they can to avoid thinking about the end of the world, everyone in this staging seems to be painfully aware that the good times are nearing a sickening end. Their debaucherous reveries, then, are fraught and tainted.

It's a subtle difference, but an effective choice, and it permeates every aspect of Knox's production, which titillates, teases and finally torments. Rooted at the center of it all is Bradley Greenwald's solid and splendidly sung performance as the Emcee. The character is ubiquitous -- wearing hose and heels in the chorus line one moment and appearing as a stern conductor the next, all the while acting as a kind of Greek chorus who doesn't so much narrate as illustrate.

...Sadly, the other leads don't provide as much support. Sara Richardson acts the snot out of the role of chanteuse Sally Bowles and is spot on in projecting a forced optimism that belies her desperation. But Richardson's singing voice is a limited instrument -- even for a character who probably is not much of a singer anyway -- and when she flats out (with disconcerting consistency), she can't fully construct the fantasy necessary to successfully carry the role.

Max Wojtanowicz presents an opposite problem as the struggling American novelist Cliff Bradshaw. His singing voice is sure enough, but his charisma-free characterization is such a limp noodle that it's hard to see why Sally would fall for him.

But there are plenty of laughs, in large part because Brandley Greenwald played an exquisite and delightfully depraved Emcee, embracing all that was other worldly about this iconic character and showing us a tremendously good time - right up to his own moment of truth. He was simply too marvelous!

...Max Wojtanowicz as Cliff played the foil to pretty much the rest of the characters - a little odd since Cliff is supposedly drawn to the Cabaret, but in this production he barely acknowledges his own presumed proclivities.

But Melissa Hart (who originated the role of Sally Bowles on Broadway) as Fraulein Schnieder was positively breathtaking. Her emotionally charged voice in "What Would You Do?" was so moving that the entire theater was silent but for that song. You could go to this show just to see this number and it would be worth it. Patrick Bailey played an endearing Herr Schultz, especially paired with Hart - a dynamic that powers the emotional content of the show and draws the relatively shallow relationship of Cliff and Sally in sharp relief.