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CABARET: A musical revival, presented by the Roundabout Theater Company at the Kit Kat Klub, 124 W. 43rd St. Book by Joe Masteroff. Lyrics by Fred Ebb. Music by John Kander. With Natasha Richardson, Alan Cumming, Ron Rifkin, and Mary Louise Wilson. Directed by Sam Mendes. Co-directed and choreographed by Rob Marshall. $50 to $75. (212) 719-1300.

ROBERT FELDBERG
Staff Writer

Watching the much-anticipated revival of "Cabaret," I thought of the line about pouring old wine into new bottles -- and not just because much of the audience was sitting at nightclub tables and sipping drinks as they watched the show.

The revival, which opened Thursday night, is the brainchild of British director Sam Mendes, who was the first to stage "Cabaret" in a cabaret setting -- in London in 1993. The idea is to envelop the audience in a dark, depraved atmosphere that suggests the Weimar Republic in its last days, before Germany passed into the hands of the Nazis. The Roundabout Theater Company is presenting the show in a former disco, renamed the Kit Kat Klub.

Mendes' notion is the kind of provocative thinking we've come to expect from an exciting new generation of British directors, and many moments of the revival are effective, almost all of them when Alan Cumming is on stage. A young Scottish actor (and the only member of the company to appear in the London "Cabaret"), Cumming plays the decadent, androgynous emcee, and he is mesmerizing. His is easily the most compelling performance of the musical-theater season.

He has a role defined by Joel Grey, but Cumming is entirely his own pervert, creating a more vulgar and disturbing master of ceremonies, and embodying in his lithe frame and suggestive singing and dancing the essence of the show. His numbers -- "Willkommen," "Two Ladies," "Money," "If You Could See Her," "I Don't Care Much" -- are very much the core of the production, and also remind us how strong the John Kander-Fred Ebb score is.

The show's dances, choreographed by co-director Rob Marshall, have a raunchy directness, although their dependence on sexual positioning and gestures limits their variety. (There hasn't been such ostentatious crotch clutching since Roseanne sang "The Star-Spangled Banner.")

What serves as the roadblock to the full realization of Mendes' idea, however, is where "Cabaret" originally came from: the Broadway musical theater of 1966.

When it debuted, the show was considered daring for bringing up Nazism in a musical, and for its use of a cabaret -- which was then a stage set -- as a metaphor for Germany in the late Twenties and early Thirties. But part of the show was anchored in the plot conventions of its time, and those aspects don't fit comfortably into the stark new conception.

"Cabaret" has two love stories, the main one being the involvement of Sally Bowles, the hedonistic English entertainer at the Kit Kat Klub, with Clifford Bradshaw, a young American writer. The other is the sentimental, old-folks pairing of Fraulein Schneider, Clifford's landlady, and Herr Schultz, her Jewish beau.

Mendes and Marshall have tried to weave these stories into the cabaret atmosphere, often having the emcee wander ominously through the couples' scenes in Schneider's rooming house. But the relationship moments take the edge off whatever grittiness has been established in the club scenes.

On top of that, Natasha Richardson is a disappointingly dull Sally. She makes her a cheery-chirpy, middle-class bird who doesn't seem desperate for pleasure or anything else. Cliff is supposed to be bisexual, but in John Benjamin Hickey's bland performance he seems asexual. The chemistry between the pair is in minus territory.

Richardson's singing is mediocre, which works very well for Sally's performances at the club, since Sally's supposed to be a lousy singer. But when Sally is singing a song that expresses her feelings, such as "Maybe This Time," the lack of a strong voice hurts. Richardson's best moment, though, is a musical one. She sings the climactic title number not in the roaring, let's-go-to-hell style of Liza Minnelli's "Cabaret," but as the feeble cry of a lost soul. It seems exactly right.

As Schneider and Schultz, Mary Louise Wilson and Ron Rifkin -- two gifted actors and limited singers -- can't raise the characters above the cuteness with which they were originally conceived, although there is some power in their parting.

With the absorbing physical closeness of the actors, Cumming's superb performance, and imaginative staging, "Cabaret" gets a grip on its audience, even if it never comes close to being the plunge into degradation that was intended.