Christopher Gray enjoys a well-acted revival of the hit Broadway musical Cabaret at the Old Fire Station

Christopher Isherwood was so offended by the liberties taken in the presentation of his Berlin life in John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical Cabaret - not least 'his' transformation from a homosexual Englishman into an all-American boy whose affair with Sally Bowles results in her pregnancy - that he stayed away from the Broadway production, thereby missing sensational performances by Lotte Lenya and Joel Grey.

Young love: Benedict Protheroe as Cliff and Sarah Snelgrove as Sally BowlesHe was less upset by Bob Fosse's 1972 film version in which, at least, 'he' remained English and was permitted to share in the sexual favours of Sally's mentor, Max. Even so, verisimilitude was forsaken as Liza Minnelli turned the third-rate actress of reality into a dazzling stage performer. As she and Joel Grey (again) high-kicked their way towards well-deserved Oscars, Isherwood observed drily that far from being on its beam end, the Kit-Kat Club with them in action "would have attracted half of Europe. You wouldn't have been able to get in for months on end."

No one is likely to attribute the same pulling power to student actors Sarah Snelgrove and Andy Mitchell who take on the roles in Oxford this week (though their work is certainly helping towards the full houses for Hot Box Productions at the Old Fire Station). Even so, theirs is a solid contribution to a thoroughly workmanlike show (director Nicola Piggott) in which some fine acting helps to compensate for entirely understandable deficiencies in the razzmatazz of the set-piece musical numbers.

While Ms Snelgrove offers a down-to-earth portrait of the fun-loving actress very different from Minnelli's bravura performance, Mr Mitchell employs, as every actor playing MC surely must, the template established by Grey. Thus we meet a preening, posturing pervert whose determination that "the show must go on" takes no account of what a dangerous new show it is. Behind his make-up mask lies deep inner corruption - in which sense, of course, he stands as a potent symbol for the Nazis, whose ineluctable rise to power is so chillingly depicted in the story.

Benedict Protheroe shows a winning stage manner as Cliff, the wide-eyed American lapping up the heady delights of prelapsarian Berlin. Having won the heart of Sally, partly through his recitation of the opening lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, he exists in a delirium of pleasure, but worried that such bliss must come at a price. "If this was a movie, there would be an earthquake or tidal wave or something," he tells Sally. But, of course, the disaster ahead was as far as it could be from an act of God. Cliff, one thinks, was soon to learn the truth of later words from Dover Beach: "The world . . . hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace . . ."

The easy emotional appeal of the Nazi philosophy is neatly illustrated in Kander's heart-tugging Tomorrow Belongs to Me (in reality, the Hitler Youth had no better anthem), which is splendidly performed here by Mark Williams. Meanwhile, we have a gentle reminder of the millions of innocent people who were taunted, spat at and ultimately murdered by jack-booted thugs in Guy Grimsley's portrayal of the elderly Jewish fruiterer Herr Schultz. His scenes of tentative romance with the no-nonsense boarding house owner Fraulein Schneider (Abi Charters) remain to haunt long after the final cabaret songs (musical director Kate Whiting) have died on the air.