FIVE STARS

With his pink-lipped rictus grin, wide staring eyes and slicked-down black shiny hair, he looks like a ghastly ventriloquist’s dummy — the sort that might just turn on his master with a well-aimed bite at the jugular. This is the nightclub host Emcee, from the musical Cabaret, as presented in a tour-de-force performance by Will Young which proves (in case we had doubted it) that the one-time Pop Idol winner can sing, dance and act with consummate skill. Is, in fact, a star.

WILL/KOM/MEN: huge letters stacked in three tiers fill the screen that confronts audiences taking their seats for this tremendous show. Here is a neat double pun — the first line supplying an obvious one, the last referring to members of the male sex (Will included) soon to be parading before us in tight black leather shorts and, at times, not even those. Female costumes — I must say at once — are scarcely less sexy. Through the centre of the middle line’s ‘O’ Emcee makes his first, spot-lit appearance, with his famous song of welcome to the decadent world of 1930s Berlin.

This is not the least of the felicitous touches offered by the director Rufus Norris, who was last week named successor to Sir Nicholas Hytner as head of the National Theatre. Another comes in the sensational close to Act I with Tomorrow Belongs to Me, here shifted from a waiter to Emcee in order, one supposes, to ‘beef up’ the star role. Beginning in a high falsetto delivered with pinpoint accuracy by Young, the yearning melody becomes a chilling Nazi rallying call during which Emcee transforms into a demented puppet-master, with Hitler tash, controlling marionette dancers on strings.

John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical (with book by Joe Masteroff) concentrates, of course, on the story of cabaret performer Sally Bowles, as revealed in the true-life tales of novelist Christopher Isherwood. This loose-living, scatty but oddly endearing character comes over vividly in a compelling performance by Siobhan Dillon. Not for the first time, though, having seen her sensational work with the Boys and Girls in Mein Herr, I marvelled at the stupidity of the Kit Kat Club’s management in letting her go.

Still, without her sacking and subsequent rescue by the bisexual American tyro novelist Cliff Bradshaw (Matt Rawle) — the Isherwood character in disguise — there would be no story and no show.

The other major narrative thread, concerning their elderly landlady Fräulein Schneider (Lyn Paul) and her romance with the Jewish fruiterer Herr Schultz (Linal Haft), is also explored with touching sensitivity.

This is a top-class production in every respect, with fabulous design (Katrina Lindsay) and superb lighting from Mark Howett — not least during the harrowing closing scene, which transports us heartbreakingly to the death camps. Tugging at the heartstrings and swinging, as necessary, the on-stage band (musical director James McCullagh) is note perfect throughout.

New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
0844 871 3040, atgtickets.com/oxford