Some things – Harold Wilson, say, or pop-tarts – were spectacularly popular in 1966, but have, alas, now grown out of fashion. To that list add Kander and Ebb’s mesmerising musical meditation on the rise of Nazism, Cabaret, whose popularity now pales in comparison with fluffier hit Hitlerzeit musicals like Bent, The Sound of Music or The Producers (Nazism has proven curiously ripe for musical mimesis). One can only welcome, then, MMPS’s deft revival of the subgenre’s most sophisticated exemplar, raising in true cabaret-spirit deadly serious questions alongside more than a few show-stopping musical numbers.

Like nothing else, Cabaret reveals Nazism as more a pall-bearer to the helcoid hearse of Weimar vibrance than some long-knived assassin - rejecting the narrative of an innocently liberal culture subsumed by fascism. Instead, it combs the kernels of corruption inherent within a no-holds-barred culture, to which Cabaret is as much indictment as homage. Millie Benson’s effulgently vivid performance as the innocent ingénue, Sally, show-stealingly captures fin-de-siècle modernism’s decadent, decrepit and dying gasps as the Kit Kat Klub’s patrons and performers sing and dance away the onset of a mass movement out to extinguish the liberty their every lyric and lock-step agonisingly celebrates.

Despite occasional misplaced feel-goodery, director Charlie Risius handled the haunting historical context with admirable subtlety, adumbrating the nastiness to come before unveiling it, the ambiguous black-and-white imagery during the patriotic paean 'Tomorrow Belongs To Me' eventually giving way to Swastikas. But the choreography, though crisp, felt bowdlerised, lacking the delectable depravity 30s Berliner cabaret epitomised. No hinting, too, at the symbiosis between sexual and political perversion. Indeed, the sexual subtext is skirted over in favour of populist polish (which the punters lovingly lapped up, so who am I to complain?). Yet, as the naughty noughties dovetail into the EDL and Geert Wilders, an awareness of the relationship between cultural excess and political perniciousness would have added some germane freshness.

A virtue is made of the venue’s small size, creating an intimacy particularly effective in foreboding a sense of impending tragedy as the Kit Kat Klub’s carefree cosmopolitanism yields to cancer. Better-acted than most things this reviewer has seen at the ADC, Rupert Mercer’s American prig and Jake Arnott’s nuanced Nazi merit mention. Thankfully, the romances were restrained, not overdone (the film processes them into low-brow soap, probably from Lidl; this is more John Lewis) and the orchestra was literally the show’s unsung hero.

Without a doubt, Cabaret entertains eminently, from emcee Rob Young’s Kurt Weill-style overture to the doom-laden finale (the Kit Kat Klub insists throughout that ‘life is a cabaret’; one knows by the end it is no such thing). This is a marionette’s-eye view of history, one through which all would be well-served to glance.