Cabaret - Playhouse Theatre

Who’s the Tiktok?

Completely agree - I saw this last week and thought I’d log on here to see what others made of the ending. For me, it’s not so much the staging but that it just sort of… ends. The fact that the majority of the original Finale number and text have been cut really doesn’t help with the impact - Schultz’s repetition of ‘What am I? A German’ and Sally’s repetition of ‘it’s just politics, what’s that got to do with us’ is in my opinion crucial for giving the piece the kick it needs in those final moments and it’s completely missing here. The original finale, with reprises of different songs in the underscore split up by the the dissonant ensemble singing of ‘Wilkommen’ is so well written that I think it’s a shame this production stepped away from it.

Callum Scott Howells was on BBC Breakfast at 7.50am today (Wed 21st) talking about the show.

It usually is for 24 hours only

Weird, I thought they usually put it on iplayer until the next episode. Maybe I'm mistaken.

Here's a small clip:

They finally seem to be putting out some more realistic ticket prices on this...I see offers online...

I'm looking forward to seeing this cast. A friend of mine who works at the theatre are saying that the producers and ticketing staff are really concerned since its not selling that well. Apparently they are raising the prices for all of the drinks, etc. in the theatre to make up for it.

Times have very quickly changed since this show opened. The expectation of accessing all those middle class professional earners with pent up spending due to lockdowns has been exhausted, and even the affluent are cutting out discretionary spending in light of soaring cost of living.

The producers need to start cutting the cloth of this show accordingly.

Do producers normally get a cut of the drink sales? (as opposed to the theatre owners)

Where are the discounts?

If you enter the TodayTix lottery, you're pretty much guaranteed to lose and then be offered Dress Circle seats for £55 each, which is cheaper than normal, but they will only sell them in twos, so limited use for a lot of people (myself included).

I'm not really sure what the producers expected though. There was clearly star power with the first class and you could argue the ticket prices were justified, but much as I think the replacement casts are talented, they don't have the same name value and a lot of people who had the money to see the original cast wouldn't rush back. So you're now marketing to the typical theatregoer (and their budget), not the celebrity seeking crowd.

I know this is a whole musical about politics so I guess a digression is just about acceptable, but the people already earning £150,000 a year (and who won't have been paying 45% tax anyway) could already afford the tickets. So that makes no difference. And frankly, the kind of person who gets to those salary levels has done so by being a workaholic, not by having evenings free to go to the theatre.

So that leave us mere mortals without such deep pockets. The theatre mad of us, who like to be at shows several nights a week, will spread the limited budget around. Unless there are loads of tourists coming in, I'm not sure who is buying the catered table seats for the third cast.

I think this could run quite nicely without the pre-show and without the catering, as a theatre show in the round, but that would require the producers to take some difficult decisions.