“The party in Berlin is over. It was a lot of fun, but it’s over.” That line is delivered by Cliff Bradshaw, American writer abroad and stand in for the gay British author Christopher Isherwood in Kander, Ebb and Masteroff’s musical theatre masterpiece, Cabaret.

Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, captures the excitement and danger of the Weimar era at a time when artists and writers felt sufficiently liberated to express their sex and sexuality while protesting political and social issues through the popular medium of sketch, song and dance. Just listen to the music of the time. Composers like Holländer, Grosz and Spoliansky wrote naughty, tuneful songs full of innuendo and packed with subversive imagery to puncture bourgeois stereotypes. Isherwood caught that sense of fun combined with danger, and so too did Kander and Ebb writing in 1966, the next genuinely permissive era. For Nicholas Christo’s new production at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre, however, fun is in fatally short supply, replaced by the kind of coarse, aggressive, sexually violent behaviour more in keeping with an up-to-date S&M club.

Chelsea Gibb and Kit Kat Girls. Photos by John McRae

This isn’t just an over-the-top misfire,...