Oh, Those Beautiful Weimar Girls!

BANGS FOR YOUR BUCK Weimar chorus girls show off their wares.

Photograph: Jonathan Slaff

“We used to have a first-class army,” notes a young journalist (John Rosania) in Oh, Those Beautiful Weimar Girls! “Now we have first-class perversion.” Set in Germany during the shadow alley between the two World Wars, Ildiko Nemeth’s stylishly morbid dance-theater piece is nostalgic for a time when sleaze was decked out in corsets and feathered masks. It is a world of arty death-dances and morphine hazes, of repressed baronesses and their nubile, sexually curious daughters. And in the middle of this costume orgy drifts Anita Berber (Lemp), the real-life scandal queen of 1920s Berlin, numb from years of shocking.

The show is at its most effective when it gives itself over to the spirit of risqué fun, as in several frisky dance numbers for scantily clad chorus girls in matching platinum-bob wigs. (The choreography is by Peter B. Schmitz—who also stars, convincingly, as an androgynous master of ceremonies—and downtown avant-burlesque mainstay Julie Atlas Muz.) But Nemeth’s hand is shakier when it comes to storytelling. Mark Altman’s slim text alternates between ponderous exposition and ultra-arch dialogue, including a patch from Oscar Wilde’s Salome; and the director’s attempts at conveying Germany’s slide into nihilism and fascism are not always effective. (Actors in bodysuits painted with glow-in-the-dark skeletons look more silly than creepy.) Berber, ultimately, remains a cipher in this refraction of Cabaret. As a survey course on Weimar decadence, the show doesn’t teach much beyond the first class.