First of all a flap in the curtain, itself a big brutalist slab heavily embossed with the word Willkommen, opens to reveal a very distinctive head.

It belongs to James Dreyfus, his black-rouged lips leering at us from between his fat, waxen jowls, his glinting eyes adding to the effect of Weimar depravity, his tongue mockingly repeating the words of welcome or willkommen.

Willkommen to his Berlin nighterie, the Kit Kat Klub. Willkommen to the Germany of 1931. Willkommen to a revival of Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical which, as staged by Rufus Norris, has its moments — but not the excitement of Sam Mendes’s production in 1993, still less the class of the movie Bob Fosse directed in 1972.

Some problems are built-in. The music is excellent in its own right, but seldom suited to the tale of the nightclub singer Sally Bowles and her affair with the initially innocent, eventually disenchanted American, Cliff Bradshaw. Weimar should surely be more Weilly. So Norris and his choreographer, Javier de Frutos, try to correct this by itallicising the era’s decadence.

Look for an abundance of suspenders, leather harness over bare torsos, and dance that includes writhing, spanking, bum-waving and explicit sex on explicit beds. But this mostly seems jaunty or merely acrobatic or over-deliberate in its attempt to signal that Berlin is a sleazy town. Often I felt that there was more sax than sex. Sensuality is missing, not least between principals who, in other ways, are perfectly competent and sometimes more. Anna Maxwell Martin can’t and probably shouldn’t match Liza Minelli’s glorious singing in the film, but her Sally is what she should be, an all-English waif with Roedean vowels who is pluckily but desperately vamping it up in Berlin. Michael Hayden does his best with Cliff, a unrewarding part derived from the uninteresting first-person protagonist of Christopher Isherwood’s original stories, but only comes fully to life when confronting Nazis who, in one of Frutos’s more striking numbers, elegantly cartwheel as they beat him up. That episode made me wince a bit, as did the moment when a kid in lederhosen sings the beautiful Tomorrow Belongs to Me, only to display the swastika on his arm as he smilingly swivels round.

Likewise with the subplot, in which Cliff’s aging landlady feels impelled to reject a Jewish lodger’s offer of marriage. It’s cursory stuff, but so well acted by a shy, forlorn Sheila Hancock and a bashful, gentlemanly Geoffrey Hutchings that I wished it was more central.

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