Cabaret.

Whatever fond memories you have of Cabaret -- Liza! Liza! Liza! Divine decadence, darling! -- director Sam Mendes sweeps them away the minute you walk through the door. For this revival (based on a 1993 production at London's Donmar Warehouse, which Mendes runs), the Roundabout Theatre Company has taken over the long-empty Henry Miller's Theatre, ripped out the seating, installed tables, and turned the place into a nightclub. Most amazing of all, he's turned what you might think is a big, splashy Broadway musical into a scrappy little nightclub act of almost overpowering intimacy.

Forget Joel Grey in a tuxedo. The emcee here is a lanky Scottish androgyne (Alan Cumming) with a pierced eyebrow, glitter-brushed nipples, and armpits furry enough to warrant a special Tony award. The Kit Kat Klub musicians, who all sing and dance, are raunchy, scarred, tattooed, cigar-chomping hairy beasts -- and those are just the girls, who also warrant a new Tony category: Sluttiest Makeup on Broadway. The scenes that compose the book of the show (very, very, very loosely inspired by Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories) are treated like vaudeville numbers, sliding on and off like standup comics at a burlesque house. Clifford Bradshaw (John Benjamin Hickey), a timid middle-American fag voyeuristically touring the Continent collecting material for a novel, rents a room in the run-down Berlin boarding-house of Fraulein Schneider (Mary Louise Wilson). Before he can say boo, he's sharing quarters with a pushy English showgirl named Sally Bowles (Natasha Richardson).

Mendes's staging is a nonstop thrill ride, as impressive for its ensemble acting as for its stripped-down theatricality. When Sally tells Cliff she's pregnant and he urges her to keep the baby, the emcee drags a stand-up mike onstage for her to sing "Maybe This Time." When she has second thoughts about giving up showbiz, it's the emcee who sings "I Don't Care Much," as if he's inside her mind, while she sits and smokes. For most of the show Richardson plays Sally as such a sentimental plain Jane that you get antsy for some glamour. But by the time she trembles through the anthemic title song looking like she's hemorrhaging from an abortion, you realize the director has gone another way with his interpretation.

In his 1974 memoir, Contradictions, director Hal Prince confesses that the original Cabaret was compromised by the decision to create a romance between Cliff and Sally (Broadway in 1966, it was believed, couldn't handle a gay leading character). The current production struggles awkwardly to freshen up the dated book. One minute Cliff is kissing rent boys, and the next he wants to drag Sally back to join the Harrisburg PTA.

Further indulging this desire to dress up a period story in today's political consciousness, Mendes ends the show with the emcee in prison uniform wearing both a yellow star and a pink triangle, while the rest of the cast hovers behind him in what looks like a gas chamber. Mistake! We all know what happened to the Weimar Republic. Part of what makes Cabaret so pungent is that its party-goers carry on, heedless that the end is near. To hit the audience over the head with that point seems gratuitous and, well, tacky. To paraphrase Bette Midler, it's a pits ending to a really terrific show.