The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s silent classic from 1919, is one of the most stylish and influential films ever produced.

It’s also one of the creepiest.

A hallmark of German Expressionism, the film is a nightmare of off-kilter, exaggerated scenery and extreme chiaroscuro, where a gaunt somnambulist commits murder while under the manipulative hands of an insane asylum director. It’s a portrait of madness unlike any other.

Numerous stage, screen, radio and TV productions have reinterpreted the film over the past 80 years, but effectively capturing the distinct look and horror of the original is difficult. The Cabinet, a production mounted by Redmoon Theater in 2005, accomplished it in spades, running for an astonishing 20 weeks. To celebrate their 20th anniversary, Redmoon has awakened the show for a brief month-long run. This time around, the show should find equal and well-deserved success.

Redmoon’s Cabinet perfectly captures the spirit of Wiene’s film while staying true to the company’s unique milieu, which blends live action, puppetry, acrobatics, miniature and elephantine props, and sets with an encompassing steampunk aesthetic. The cumulative effect is a condensed world of awe-inspiring dread and horror wrapped in spectacle of the highest order.

Redmoon pulls out all of the stops, with nods to Japanese Bunraku theater, Indian shadow puppetry, silent cinema and more, to tell the tale of the pitiful, perpetual sleepwalker, his sadistic controller and those who happen to cross their paths. The action itself is contained within a wood façade designed to look like a massive cabinet. A baker’s dozen of oddly shaped doors affixed to its face open to reveal expressionistic interior and exterior set pieces, an antique Victrola record player that produces the soundtrack and other curiosities.

Inhabiting the cabinet are puppets ranging from small paperdoll-like cut-outs to striking, expressive creations that would fit comfortably in a Tim Burton production. Operating these oddities are five eerie, androgynous handlers suited in peculiar uniforms with whitened, bespectacled faces. When not manning their charges, the puppeteers maneuver with acrobatic grace up, down and often upside-down through the cabinet’s many levels.

Though based on a silent film, The Cabinet is hardly quiet. Its auditory sensations are as loud and haunting as its visual design.

Breaking from its progenitor, which was narrated via on-screen intertitles by a victim of the homicidal pair, The Cabinet’s guide is the somnambulist himself. His is a voice of resigned pain and fear. This narrative shift enhances the pathos even further, elevating the sleepwalker into a much more tragic figure. The accompanying haunting music, hisses and scratches from decrepit record albums, and other strange noises, create a soundscape both unsettling and jarring.

For all of its plentiful pluses, The Cabinet has one small negative — the fault of Redmoon’s performance space rather than the production itself. The rows of seats situated before the cabinet and its players sit at a low angle, creating sightline problems that led many audience members to strain their necks to see past the patrons seated in front of them. This is a minor quibble, however. Once enveloped in The Cabinet’s world, all discomfort is quickly forgotten.

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By Lisa from Denver
Posted: 02/13/2010 9:46 PM

Tell those people in the front row to sit back in their seats. I have't seen this show; but other puppet theatre where the audience was so on the edge of their seats, you could't see around them. Politely ask the folks in front of you to settle back.