Cabaret Any production of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 Broadway hit would benefit from losing half its score (most of the nonfamous songs stop the action dead while belaboring the obvious), but No Stakes Theater Project’s scrappy staging would do well to ax them all. The collective efforts of director Erin Shea Brady, choreographer Mollyanne Nunn, musical directors Emilie Modaff and Erick Rivera, and a loose four-piece band never successfully put a song across or bring the seedy Kit Kat Klub credibly to the stage. Fortunately, the cast skillfully plumb most of the depths of Joe Masteroff’s well-crafted book, making the story of doomed romance—and doomed progressive sexual politics—in the Weimar Republic’s final days disarmingly poignant. In the thankless central role of struggling novelist Cliff Bradshaw, Cory Hardin captivates. —Justin Hayford
Lady X: The Musical Hell in a Handbag’s prolific David Cerda reworks his 2010 play into an insightfully terrible, noiresque backstage musical. A gaggle of chorus-girl hookers (dumb, sauced, jaded, or all three) sing and dance their way into and out of gangland trouble under the murderous eye of their nightclub boss, underground queenpin Scarlet Fontanelli. The first half hour is so craftily written, ingeniously tuneful (music by Cerda and Scott Lamberty), wickedly vulgar, and crisply performed that the remaining 90 minutes—which in any other context would be mostly terrific—often seem merely good. This artful cloaking of progressive gender politics under cross-dressing absurdity and big dance numbers deserves judicious trimming and tightening. As the fire-haired, overstuffed Fontanelli, Cerda is an utter horror. —Justin Hayford
