KEY POINTS:
The Silo's intimate space and grunge-like sense of style are well suited to cabaret theatre. When you throw in table service, a hot jazz combo, great songs and a fine vocal trio it is easy to imagine you have been transported to the Weimar Republic, where the doomed cabaret culture raised a candle against the dark night of fascism.
The Dada-style collages on the walls are a nice touch, but in focusing on period detail director-designer John Verryt seems to loose sight of the essential spirit of cabaret, which demands a commitment to spontaneity and direct engagement with the audience.
Expecting the band leader to double as MC was probably a mistake, for while Paul Barrett impresses on the keyboard he struggles to pull off the improvised repartee that might have taken the evening beyond the level of song recital.
But as recitals go, Berlin is a winner. The programme guides us through a range of emotions and introduces little-known gems alongside the more familiar classics by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.
Jennifer Ward-Lealand's performance is engaging and illuminating. She wrings every last drop irony out of Munchausen, a song that deflates the grand lies about truth and justice, while insisting that we desperately need these illusions.
Ward-Lealand shines in the character-based songs, such as Surabaya Johnny, where the dilemma of loving a rotten man is perfectly captured in her deadpan delivery of the hook line, "Take that damn pipe out of your mouth you dog".
But for my money the star of the show was Lana Nesnas, a sensuous presence with a hugely assured voice that went straight to the emotional heart of all her songs. The audience were spellbound as she drifted among the tables, conjuring up the aching melancholy of Youkali, a haunting paean to an obscure and unattainable ideal.
The standout performance was her rendition of Pirate Jenny, a darkly disturbing song in which a housemaid turns the tables and takes bloody revenge on the gentlemen whose floors she has been scrubbing. Bob Dylan has described how he chanced on Pirate Jenny in a Greenwich Village theatre and came away with a radically altered concept of what songwriting could be. Nesnas' mesmerising performance reveals how this song could have produced such an epiphany.
Like the overall direction, the approach to choreography is refined and restrained. But if Berlin is a little disappointing as a piece of theatre, it provides a moving testament to the power of song.
