The production of librettist Joe Masteroff, composer John Kander, and lyricist Fred Ebb's "Cabaret" that exploded onto the Geva Theatre Center's stage on Saturday night is the most decadent version I've seen - more so than the 1966 Broadway original and the 1972 Oscar-winning movie. Every time I see it, it gets more decadent, more corrupt, as if it's mirroring, not only the breakdown in morality and social order that led to the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Berlin, but also our own narcissistic, sex-besotted time.

Based on John Van Druten's play, "I Am a Camera," (1951) derived in turn from Christopher Isherwoods's "The Berlin Stories," (1946) "Cabaret" tells the story of Clifford Bradshaw (Romain Fruge), a more-or-less innocent abroad who dreams of becoming a novelist. He arrives in Berlin, where he stumbles into an affair with Sally Bowles (rock singer Storm Large), a frivolous party girl and a singer at the seedy Kit Kat Club. As their affair deepens and Germany intensifies its flirtation with Adolph Hitler, the mordant musical numbers in the club reflect what is happening outside.

The show is much more plot-driven than the movie, including an important storyline involving Frau Schneider, the owner of the boarding house where Clifford lives, and Herr Schulz, her Jewish boarder. The aging couple, played charmingly by Michele Mariana and Richard Matthews, offers a view of love as sweet but old-fashioned, and impossible in Germany's New Order.

Director Chris Coleman's approach to the play is deliberately vulgar to underscore its spirit of decadence, but also, perhaps, to pander to his audience, which also becomes the audience in the Kit Kat Club. He nearly pulls it off. The singing is usually convincing emotionally, the dancing eager and athletic, and on opening night at least one woman in the audience was willing to caress the Emcee's thigh from her front row seat.

Storm Large is a strong, expressive singer but Fruge cannot do a lot with a thankless part, the weakest in the play. Sally is shallow and self-destructive, but for "Cabaret" to work she must be sexually alive and irresistible. Large projects anarchic eroticism even though she isn't much of an actor. The scenes between her and Fruge lack drive as she speeds through her lines, too many of them impossible to understand.

Wade McCollum as the Emcee, in many ways the play's thematic center, plays the role as an androgynous, implicitly bisexual changeling, a lurking, ghostly presence in scene after scene, always learning and shifting - and bringing what he learns back to his numbers in the Club. He is graceful, attractive (perhaps too attractive for the role), and brilliant in the mock song-and-dance number, "If You Could See Her." His fake fornicating with a chorus of sparsely-clad men and women in "Wilkommen," the opening number, elicited shrieks of laughter from the audience, but his later stabs at humor fell flat. After the initial shock, he doesn't seem to be naturally funny, even when the material is darkly sexual.

Because this is a musical, it is heavily microphoned. That's bad enough, but the system distorted singing voices, added occasional echoes, and kept changing the volume. It needs attention.

There is nothing subtle or nuanced in this production of "Cabaret." Some of its scenes are truly throat catching, but too often its effects are blunt and heavy-handed. The power of this major American musical remains, but it's as if Coleman and his crew didn't quite trust the rest of us to get it without a sledgehammer to help. 

Cabaret

Through February 17

Geva Theatre Center, 75 Woodbury Blvd.

232-GEVA, gevatheatrecenter.org