A rouge 'Cabaret'

This "Cabaret" is hot.

The John Kander and Fred Ebb musical, which opened with bawdy sparks and a bit of pizazz Tuesday at Ordway Center, has steam coming off not only its red costumes, but also the bald head of Nick Garrison, who plays the emcee of the Kit Kat Klub in Weimar-era Berlin with a winking charm (imagine Jack Nicholson as the Joker in red leather).

The heat, however, is not universal. Tari Kelly, in the crucial role of Sally Bowles, is mostly wanting. Her quick, overdone movements, particularly in the dramatic moments, are not of a woman who knows her power. They are mostly of someone eagerly trying to prove something. She looks like a little girl playing dressup with her mother's sexy clothes. But on two numbers -- the title song and the dreamy "Maybe This Time" -- Kelly gives a sense of Sally's potency.

Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage." Kander and Ebb added music to that sentiment, saying "life is a cabaret, old chum."

Unlike the stark, black-and-white decadence of the Sam Mendes stage version that bowled over the country a decade ago, director Bill Berry's Moulin Rouge-flavored "Cabaret" is more colorful and thrilling. Berry, of Seattle, has taken the palette of the Nazi flag -- red, black and white -- to inform this production design.

The set, designed by Tom Sturge, has an asymmetry and jail-like bars that hang over it to give a sense of the world closing in on Weimar-era Berlin.

Berry is adept at manipulating and undermining symbols. He changes the giddy mood suddenly in "Cabaret" by introducing a swastika here, a goose step there.

And as I watched Tuesday, noting not just the fun the actors seemed to be having but also the shortcomings of the show (the Ian Eisendrath-led orchestra, jamming in drag, sounded a bit anemic in places), I marveled at how he has put this show together.

The cast is generally strong. For example, Allen Fitzpatrick's Herr Schultz and Suzy Hunt's Fraulein Schneider give the show some of its most tender moments. Actor Tyson Forbes, who was a delphic Thomas Jefferson in the Guthrie's "1776," plays archetypal Nazi Ernst Ludwig with both menace and tall elegance. (Come to think of it, he may be too good to be a Nazi.) Louis Hobson goes just below the surface of Cliff Bradshaw, the witness and writer of all of it.

In the moments when "Cabaret" went slack, I just let it wash over me. Then, at the end, my patience was powerfully rewarded. The Nazis had all but taken over and the Kit Kat Klub entertainers were doing their thing, without music, off-rhythm. It was a beautiful depiction of the end of a world of freedom and wanton sexuality.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390