Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret, Cadogan Hall, review: 'A delight from start to finish'

Humphries sets out to illustrate the Weimar Republic through music

The show, featuring cabaret-singer Meow Meow and the Australian Chamber Orchestra is a delight from start to finish (Harmony Nicholas)

We’ve read Christopher Isherwood, we’ve watched Liza Minelli in Cabaret, we think we know about the Weimar Republic. Barry Humphries’ aim in the show with which he is now touring the world is to demonstrate – in the most enjoyable way – how wrong we are. Describing Weimar as ‘that brief period of democracy and artistic experiment which ended with the rise of Hitler’, he sets out to illustrate this through music.

He’s spent most of his life mulling over this story, which began when he found a stack of sheet-music in a Melbourne second-hand bookshop in the 1940s: this proved to represent a forgotten pantheon of Viennese-Jewish composers. His quest continued when he picked up a first-edition shellac recording of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera in a Covent Garden record shop.

The show he’s put together with the aid of cabaret-singer Meow Meow and the Australian Chamber Orchestra is a delight from start to finish, as chamber works by Krenek, Schulhoff, Weill, and Eisler plus a dozen other obscurer names are revealed as bracingly subversive (and shot through with jazz). Humphries – now 82 – sings, dances, and free-associates wickedly in his role as MC; Meow Meow indulges in hilarious extremes of raunchiness; and the multi-talented band lifts the curtain on an unexpectedly variegated musical world.

At the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, August 8-9