http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/arts/emma-stone-takes-over-in-cabaret.html 2014-12-05 05:03:55 Emma Stone Takes Over in ‘Cabaret’ Taking over the role in “Cabaret” at Studio 54, Emma Stone portrays Sally as a desperately energetic flapper whose worst fear is not mattering. === Here she comes, burning bright, burning fast, burning out. As the doomed, silly Sally Bowles in the Roundabout Theater Company’s eternal revival of Millay’s ode to hedonism was published at the very beginning of the 1920s. And Ms. Stone, in a scintillating Broadway debut, brings a heady whiff of the gin-soaked desperation of that decade to her portrayal of an ambitious, hard-partying and not very talented singer in Weimar Berlin. This is Sally as a The Kit Kat Club, the setting for Sally’s flailing bid for stardom, may be a dim and murky dive. But say what you will about her, this gal sure lights up the joint. Ms. Stone adds more than the usual box office allure of a big name from the movies attached to the stage. She gives a shot of heart-revving adrenaline to Rob Marshall and Sam Mendes’s revival of a revival of Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s much-performed She may not be the best Sally Bowles I’ve ever seen. There’s a lot of competition in that department, including actresses who have won an Oscar ( That, surprisingly, cannot be said of Ms. Stone’s most immediate, illustrious predecessor in the role, Michelle Williams, who starred as Sally when Ms. Williams, an actress I have admired deeply on both stage and screen, wasn’t bad as Sally. She’s rather a better singer than Ms. Stone, and she had the character’s upper-middle-class British accent down pat. But she appeared to have drunk too deeply of the show’s fatalism, seeming broken and defeated from the get-go. As the Mendes-Marshall “Cabaret” tends to semaphore imminent doom with every step its dancers take, the show risks being a downer unless it looks as if at least somebody were having fun. Since the spring, that function has until now fallen entirely to Mr. Cumming, whom you could imagine still happily flirting with and teasing “Cabaret” audiences 25 years from now (perhaps opposite the daughter or even granddaughter of one his Sallys past.) Now that Ms. Stone has arrived, Mr. Cumming could ease up on the crowd courting, should he so choose. Her red hair sculpted into sleek flames, Ms. Stone gives us a Sally who’s a siren in more ways than one. “Wake up!” she seems to be saying to everyone she encounters. “Look at me! I count!” Ms. Stone — who, for the record, sings and dances well enough to justify her character’s job at the Kit Kat Club, while making us understand why she’ll never advance much beyond it — is also savvy enough to let us know that Sally’s greatest fear is that she doesn’t count. This realization both frightens and angers her, while giving us a crucial key of empathy to her character. Wildly, fiercely affected, she turns both her songs and her dialogue into a seesaw between fierce assertion and painful flashes of self-awareness. And when she sings “Maybe This Time,” about her burgeoning love affair with Cliff, it’s a heartbreaker because it begins with such hope. Staged as if it were taking place in a real nightclub, the original Mendes-Marshall “Cabaret” scratched an itch for New Yorkers in search of a mildly libidinous night out. It’s a vacuum that was filled during the show’s absence by titillating revues like It didn’t surprise me that the people at the table next to mine at “Cabaret” had seen several previous versions of this production. I suspect this show has a lot of repeat attendees. It’s a relief to report, therefore, that Ms. Stone provides a very good reason to revisit this cozy little corner of hell.