He's not an outlier. Holden in Vulture and several other respected critics are as put off by the self-conscious excess. And startling bloat. Cabaret has always been a well-oiled machine, a show with a wickedly unreliable annotator, its central narrator unable to turn observation into story until the end. This sounds like everything thrown against the wall, and per others, guilty of the worse sin: unable to conjure the era.