Jack Woodhead and Mark Wartenberg return to London with their Berlin Cabaret No. 5 show. It promises to be “a thrilling, beautiful and darkly funny musical journey through the highs and lows of life in Berlin.”
Life and Death
Our show Berlin Cabaret, obsessed with the truths of a difficult world, is often brutal, mostly hilarious and always profoundly human. For our fifth outing to Crazy Coqs, life and death are sparring partners. The show is a heart-racing drop into the depths of the human soul. We’ll take you through a fall, a countdown, a dirge.
Queer and Camp
We always rely on our unique dynamic: Jack is an entertainer and classically trained pianist, born in Manchester. Mark is an Oxbridge-educated actor and writer with French, German, and Indonesian roots who recently filmed all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. We’re queer and camp, and our practice plays with multiple genres by pitting them against each other to create a rising tension.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The structure of Berlin Cabaret is simple: the law of gravity, a vertical fall that must accelerate and then stop. As Mark plummets, a piano kicks into action and Jack, emcee par excellence, kicks up a storm of glitter and glamour. Devilish and angelic at once, he revels in ribald entertainment, a blood-red lip slit and Swarovski heels that dent the floor with every stage strut. His gobby gabbing is the id and superego to Mark’s desperately dwindling self.
The Heat of Avant-Garde
That tension makes the show’s dynamism. Berlin Cabaret is a feast that devours performance art, theatre and cabaret. It wants theatre even as it yearns for cabaret, and the hot friction caused by that overlap makes the show a perfect fit for the gorgeous velvet space that is Crazy Coqs. The show is an assemblage of fragments of Berlin and France, classical music, performance art, Manchester and Indonesia, cabaret, chanson, the past and future, real and invented memories, desires and fears, the clutter of one’s real and imagined life. If you want a Klaus Nomi homage followed by a satirical homophobic duet followed by an Edith Piaf song followed by some Haydn, this is the show for you. Berlin Cabaret offers food for thought under the cover of entertainment.
The Coolness of Architecture
But it also puzzles thinking through an architectural approach to performance. Our identities are a hidden world of broken memories, and the show is a collection of shards that we glue back in real time in front of you. The ultimate emcee in our show is the architecture, a mathematical cage in which we nestle our souls. As a result, Berlin Cabaret is a hall of mirror shards. It catches our ignited energies, the tension between theatre and cabaret, within its cold unbending prism, only to bend them at will the way a black hole bends what is around it. The show is both entertaining and alienating, polite and rude, good and bad.
Stay Warm
Meanwhile, the seasons run their course, cyclical but out of joint. Midnight Winter turns to sizzling Summer turns to sprightly Spring turns to Autumn’s amnesia. Heat turns to cold as blue turns to yellow, and the circular subterranean world of Crazy Coqs transforms into a glacial hellscape of tattered memories and fiery dreams. Berlin Cabaret is about how we keep ourselves warm and alive within the reality of an unconcerned and unfeeling world.
Freedom
And we fall through circles of hell, down floor after floor, into the past and into the future, to the bitter end or a new beginning. We fall through the show, in a dance macabre that accelerates with every song, every number, every skit. As we navigate the cruel logic of seasons and speed, of life and death, the question is how to be free. Will we dare to break rules, to fall, to lose the audience? How do we defy gravity? Through song and gimmick? And why not?
Berlin Cabaret No 5 is on 29 May, 7pm, at Crazy Coqs, 20 Sherwood Street, London W1F 7ED, United Kingdom.
The Berlin-based duo have also recently written the music and lyrics for the official musical adaptation of Timur Vermes’ hit book and film “Look Who’s Back”, a political satire about Adolf Hitler who wakes up in Berlin in the modern era. The musical premieres this September at Theater für Niedersachsen in Germany.
