Sit down. Relax. Let all your cares – and inhibitions – take the night off, and enjoy yourself in a small, dark, intimate cabaret in pre-World War II Berlin. As American visitor Cliff Bradshaw (Greg Tankersley) tells cabaret star Sally Bowles, 1930s Berlin is “like kids running around playing, and pretty soon the parents will come home.” But the parents are coming home sooner than the kids will admit, and so they go on with their fun, ignoring the rise of the Nazis and the disturbing changes going on all around them. This story, based on the true-life memoirs of Christopher Isherwood, focuses on Cliff, a young American writer who moves to Berlin and experiences the fun, the love, the wildness, and the tragedy portrayed in the play.

Sean Murray returns to North Coast Rep to direct this incredible production and a terrific cast in the Rep’s cozy, intimate theatre space, Marty Burnett’s scenic design helping to give you the feel of really being in the small, slightly rundown and tattered Kit Kat Klub, its brick walls scribbled with graffiti – lovingly referred to as a “seedy little dive.” In an extra touch, you have to walk through a curtain of threaded beads to enter the theatre. Costumes by Shelly Williams complete the illusion, with cabaret dancers scarred by runs in their stockings or hems falling apart.

Wellkomming us into this seedy little dive is a marvelous Master of Ceremonies featuring Jeremiah Lorenz in a role that allows him to really demonstrate his talent, beginning with his charismatic connection with the audience and including comical expressions and movements that start to transform into a nightmarish parody of comedy and laughter as the kids’ party nears its final days at the hands of the growing Nazi party.

Jeremiah is joined by a sensuous group of dancers/singers/etcetera, the Kit Kat Girls and Boys who interact and entertain in a variety of ways – doing so through David Brannen’s amusing and creative choreography that especially shines in such numbers as the Fruit Shop Dance, Kick Line, and Money (Makes the World Go ‘Round). The music is provided by a sensational little band on the side of the theatre whose members are also part of the show. But in between the Kit Kat numbers, when the main characters take center stage, the cabaret dancers and band members reverse roles and watch the story unfold as if the “real” people are the show and the cabaret performers are the audience.

The story of the “real” people centers on the relationship between Cliff, the writer from Pennsylvania (Greg Tankersley), and the sexy, not-at-all modest star of the cabaret, Sally Bowles (K.B. Mercer). He is drawn to her passion for life and consequence-free style, but she takes that style to a dangerous extreme – an extreme that includes heavy drug use, drinking, and no concern for the troubling political developments occurring in Germany.

Those developments become apparent in the midst of the charming romance of another couple – Linda Libby as the prudish, middle-aged, German landlady Fraulein Schneider who gets swept off her feet by the kind and gentlemanly Herr Schultz (Jim Chovick), a German Jew. But just as it seems all are on the path to living happily ever after, the Nazis make their presence and their ideology felt, and force all the lovers to make a painful choice.