A more glamorous than ominous 'Cabaret'

There are moments of menace and flashes of abandon in New Repertory Theatre's staging, which marks Rick Lombardo's final show before the company's producing artistic director leaves for good to take the helm at the San Jose Repertory Theatre. But this is a largely low-wattage production - good-natured and agreeable until it's time for a peek at a swastika. What's missing is a palpable underbelly: the seamy buzz and perpetual sense of foreboding that would lend depth to the show's evocation of prewar German indifference.

John Kuntz's Emcee is creepy, but in a clownish sort of way. At home in a tuxedo, a diaper, or garters and teddy, Kuntz is a ghoulishly congenial host who presides over a voluptuous gaggle of writhing girls in Berlin's Kit Kat Klub, which in set designer Peter Colao's hands boasts a properly seedy assortment of dingy wood, old mirrors, faded brass, and cheap art. The band, all its visible members in drag, is stationed above the stage, and the play's other locales - Fraulein Schneider's rooming house, Herr Schultz's fruit market, and a train car - roll in and out of the club's interior with ingenious simplicity and metaphorical resonance.

This is where the American writer Cliff Bradshaw, played with maximal earnestness by David Krinitt, encounters the British singer Sally Bowles. Aimee Doherty can't quite tamp down her inner ingenue, which continually threatens to extinguish the flickers of complexity and vulnerability she brings to the role of Sally. She belts everything with a smile on her face, including the penultimate title song, substituting strong tones for the desperate, tattered resolve the theatrical and historical moment calls for.

Similarly, the denizens of the Kit Kat Klub seem to inhabit a world defined more by exuberant sexuality than a frantically gathering storm. The girls are hale and hearty, and for all the wiggling and jiggling, hardly decadent. So sympathetic - bumbling, really - is the Emcee that his occasional portentous outbursts - pressing a toothbrush moustache to his lip, for instance - come off as unsavory slapstick rather than loaded commentary.