The original Cabaret was written at a time when it was bad enough trying to deal with Nazis on Broadway – sexual ambiguities were out of the question. Sally Bowles and the young Englishman Clifford are transformed from a tart and a voyeur into a nice young couple with a few problems. Half the emotional weight is transferred on to a syrupy December romance between the landlady Fraulein Schneider and the kindly Jewish fruit seller Herr Schultz.

Kelly Hunter as Sally, under enormous pressure in a role so dominated by Minelli, reclaims the character for realism. In her very first appearance you see the convent girl beneath the vampish make-up and the defiant grin, and she is touchingly inept as she wobbles through her cabaret numbers – as she should be. Wayne Sleep’s performance has a graceful, sinister edge that the rest of Gillian Lynne’s production can’t grasp. The chorus-line looks splendid with their drooping red mouths and smudged eyes, but there is no decadence here. The maudlin script must share the blame, as should the designer Mark Thompson who has set Cabaret in what looks like a graffiti-covered warehouse and has made remarkably little attempt to exploit the sense of a live nightclub stage. There is no sense of the Kit Kat Club as a dark and secret world, gradually overtaken by events – the Nazi theme is hammered throughout with a crassness that prevents our being shocked or moved.