Review: Cabaret at The Kit Kat Club at Balthazar
Photo: Daniel Carminati
Theming a dining experience around London’s most immersive musical is no small thing. Can Covent Garden’s Balthazar capture the seedy decadence of Cabaret’s Weimar Berlin atmosphere?
For this six-week residency (21st September to 1st November), the restaurant has paired with Rebecca Frecknall's winner of seven Olivier awards. The theatrical production, which has passed 1,500 performances and currently stands as the longest-running West End staging of the musical, made its name with the nifty idea of turning the pre-show into a show.
Even if the bar is very low, Cabaret is the West End’s most successful stab at immersive theatre. The audience enter through the rear entrance of the Playhouse Theatre and, after having their tickets checked, wander into a basement bar. A complimentary shot of liquor or a small beer pressed into the hands of those who want to start the party early. Inside, the entire venue is decked out to resemble a louche, subterranean club. Lighting is kept low even if everyone may be high (the original press release collaborated with a hemp supplier and suggested that audiences 'can even smoke a strain for more fun'). Throughout this 'Prologue', dancers in period attire cavort around the space, pulling focus and returning sly smiles. Once the metaphorical curtain goes up on Tom Scutt’s evocative staging, the dancers retreat to visible spots around the venue and embedded musicians strike up.
Balthazar deconstructs this concept through a set menu, a cocktail list and (on Fridays only), live entertainment in the form of music and dance. That week-ending evening has a very different vibe. First, a singer and her musical director work through well-known songs from the musical, among them 'Perfectly Marvelous', 'Don't Tell Mama', 'Cabaret' and 'Mein Herr'.
Anyone expecting a rousing rendition of arguably the highly memorable 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' - sung in Cabaret to signal the pivot into much darker territory - will be disappointed. Considering, though, how that utter bastard of an earworm has been adopted by right-wingers from the student section of the Conservative Party to white supremacist bands, that omission may not be a complete surprise.
Photo: Daniel Carminati
After the singing finishes, four Prologue dancers take over the room. They prowl about the front of the restaurant, walk along the low wooden walls that fence the dining area and then drop onto the stage. Either alone or working in pairs or as a trio, they reassemble as a quartet for the memorable finale. The dancers are the most tenuous link to the West End production. What has not made the journey is the transgression.
The Playhouse Prologue trades in sensuality and gender play with the confidence of a show built to unsettle. Here the signalling amounts to one of the three women donning a thin painted-on moustache and the only man in heavy green eye make-up. The touches of menace and deviance Frecknall conjured up for her show have not migrated into this establishment.
Photo: Daniel Carminati
For this interpretation of Weimar Berlin, the menu leans more to the west of Alsace than east of it. Starters include a French onion soup and duck confit pâté; the mains have salmon from the Shetlands and Gallic favourite entrecôte (a palm-sized slab of steak that with the tenderness of a midnight kiss); the desserts feature Paris-Brest (hazelnut praline with vanilla ice cream), and you can quaff an apple spritz that has a Teutonic name and French calvados in it. Of everything on the £65 Friday card, only the Black Forest gâteau has any claim on Germany, and even that effort – deconstructed but delicious - hails from the opposite corner of the country.
The cocktail list is where the tie-in is most obvious. Five of the six drinks are built on Brugal 1888’s Dominican rum and named after songs: 'Willkommen', 'Mein Mojito', 'So What?', 'Perfectly Marvelous' and 'The Finale'. The odd one out, the £12.50 'Apfel Spritz', combines a German name, Spanish vermouth, and French calvados.
Photo: Daniel Carminati
The Cabaret connection feels more like a commercially minded graft onto a standard French brasserie concept than the absinthe-soaked reinvention this would like to be (the nearest thing on the drinks card is a touch of anise in the 'Perfectly Marvelous'). It would be harsh, though, to accuse Balthazar of jumping on a bandwagon. That ship has long since sailed: Christopher Isherwood distilled his experiences in the German capital into the 1939 short novel Goodbye to Berlin, John Van Druten turned that into the 1951 play I Am a Camera, and in 1966 Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb turned the play into Cabaret, adding the Kit Kat Klub and its Emcee. Each adapter borrowed from the last, switched art form and added something of their own. Balthazar is simply continuing that trend, only with a brilliantly executed set menu, commendable service and a modified cocktail list.
★★★
[Tickets gifted in exchange for an honest review]
Words: Franco Milazzo
Cabaret at The Kit Kat Club at Balthazar runs at Balthazar Covent Garden every Friday until 1st November 2026. Tickets, which include a three-course meal, are priced from £65.00 per person. To book, visit balthazarlondon.com
