ongoing – Fri. Oct. 29

 Amanda Palmer in the role she was born to play? The MC in “Cabaret.” It just maybe. Palmer – who came to local fame as half of the Dresden Dolls and then went onto a solo career (news flash: Dresden Dolls reuniting for a few gigs, end of year!) and, well, another career as half of the fictional conjoined twins group Evelyn Evelyn – has taken to the stage Oberon for “Cabaret.” Palmer told us: “We’re using a really fantastic director, Steven Bogart, one of my artistic mentors with whom I worked together last year in ‘The Needle That Sings in My Heart.’ [It was a play staged at Palmer’s high school in Lexington; Bogart is the drama teacher there.] Also we’ve got a really wonderful choreographer named Stephen Mitchell Wright, whose specialty is physical theater, in particular Japanese butoh style. So there are going to be really interesting creative movement elements in the production.”
   “The dream we have for the production is to create an entire, living breathing space and the show will begin the moment you open the front door. We’re hoping to make the thing a giant installation. I think I picked up my love of immersive theater from Steve Bogart. This experience will be a culmination of a lot of different things. I’m hoping to create an experience for people who attend, that’s just really emotional and unforgettable. We’re pretty much sticking with the script, but we’re adding a lot on top, inside and outside the space.
    In press notes just sent out, Palmer says, "This production has been ten years in the making - an ongoing fantasy I've had in the back of my mind. I was so inspired by Bogart’s version of the show that [done in high school in 2001] I yearned for it to reach a wider audience. Bogart is truly a hidden gem of a director. Having worked with lots of directors now, I've come to realize how special and brazen he is in terms of the artistic risks he'll take."
    "Cabaret", a musical based on Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories", is set in the seedy Kit Kat Klub nightclub in Berlin in 1931, and follows the Nazi rise to power against the backdrop of Weimar decadence
    "People often don't have the slightest clue what 'Cabaret' is actually about,” continues Palmer. Tthey know the Liza Minnelli tune and don't realize that the actual song 'Cabaret' is about as dark as it gets - that it's being sung by a strung-out coke addict about to get an abortion that she pays for by hocking her clothes. It's an incredibly dark show with an incendiary message that's still very relevant today."
    Oberon is a different kind of theatre space. It has a full bar and will be functioning as a proper nightclub with classic cabaret seating and table service.
   "It doesn't make sense to me to do this show as a proscenium production - you want to be INSIDE of the Kit Kat Klub,” Palmer says, “not observing it. This production is going to be messy, risky and sexy. People won't know what hit them the minute they walk in the door - we're creating an entire world that covers every inch of the venue."
    As you might expect here, the production contains nudity, simulated sex, and drug use. Which means it’s recommended for 16 and older, unless accompanied by an adult.
    Show times: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays at 7:30pm,. Fridays at 7:30pm and 10:30pm. Tickets: $25-$15.
  
Palmer is engaged to the writer-artist Neil Gaiman, who did the Oscar-nominated “Coraline.” We spoke to Gaiman about her. They met at a comics convention in the spring of 2008. They talked about the two of them collaborating on a book to accompany her solo album, “Who Killed Amanda Palmer.” A friendship formed. Palmer was dating someone. Gaiman didn’t wish to intrude.
    But Palmer’s after that relationship ended, the two had their first date at a “Saturday Night Live” show in January 2009. A month later they were in Dublin at a screening of “Coraline.” On their third date, back in New York, Gaiman says, “That was at the point where I started to realize this was something really serious. It’s the most comfortable relationship I’ve ever been in. We’re incredibly similar in some things, and incredibly different in other ways.”
    Gaiman remembers Palmer telling him, “’If you’re gonna be with you’re gonna get flak.’ I live a reasonably flak-free life, and she is somebody not that courts controversy but has no fear of standing up and saying what she thinks very loudly. She loves the spotlight. She is fearless and meets everything head-on.”
   Who is Amanda Palmer, the artist?
   “Faced with two career options,” Gaiman says, “one of which leads to fame and fortune and the other leading to interacting with a bunch of people, she will take interacting with people every time. It’s both wonderful and almost incomprehensible to people who look at the music business as a business.”
    When Gaiman and Palmer marry – next summer, likely – she’ll cut back her incessant schedule.
   “I don’t have a firm plan,” she says. “You’ve caught me one of those wishy-washy days where I’m thinking about going to live in an ashram forever. He’ll support my ashram decision, if I decide to go.
The two of us are really busy and we barely see each other as it is. It’s been a very absentee relationship in a lot of ways. We want to do it right at the right time when we have enough quite space in our lives.”
    Now, Palmer, 34, is someone who likes the spotlight – she Twistters and blogs constantly as well as everything else – and she won’t be as omnipresent.
  Palmer reacts: “I have thought about that. I think being in the spotlight is great, but the spotlight can also blind and burn you and it can also make you lose perspective. It’s very important as a public human being that you find your center and your ability to simply be fundamentally ok without the watchful eye of your public. I think it’s hard to find that balance. It can be very exciting to constantly share my life and my trials and my tribulations and my ups and my downs with everybody in the known universe. But that also comes with a price and the price is when you don’t necessarily get the reaction you expected, or a bunch of hotheaded, angry feminists come at you with pitchforks. When those things happen, you realize sometimes you’ve created a monster.”
     “You become a mirror for so many people and that can take its toll on you and you don’t necessarily want to show up for that kind of work every day. But it’s also a responsibility, it’s a kind of lifestyle that comes with a real responsibility as any real responsibility that has a lot of give and take. You don’t not show up for work for a while and then show up and expect the same results as from when you left. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I really love my life, I love my fans, I love how intelligent they are and I love that they are able to come after me when they think I’m fucking up. And actually create intelligent dialog. There’s a lot of intelligent dialog going on and I feel proud and honored that even if I’m standing in the fire, at least there’s a fire going. There is a tone to the project that is very old-school and in the realm of old circus. A lot of that stuff was uncomfortable. In a sense, we’re being taken to task for a genre that we kind of adopted.  But as long as it engenders an intelligent discussion, that’s fine.”
   In addition to “Cabaret,” and a just finished Evelyn Evelyn tour, Palmer ahs a double album of Radiohead songs played on ukulele. She also corded and posted this song “Gaga/Palmer/Madonna” with just her and your ukulele about fame, sexuality, povocation and a woman’s role in doing that.
    “What motivated it,” Palmer says, “was I had a webcast discussion and when started talking about Lady Gaga and what the deal was. And I was looking at fans weighing in there are many varied opinions on Lady Gaga and I started trying to explain my take on Lady Gaga which is very ambivalent. It’s very hard to fully figure out what I think, because there’s so many topics in play. And I think that’s the way a lot of artists are coming at it. I started writing this long didactic blog about it and then I realized I could actually do it more justice and with more humor if I just wrote a song. I wrote it and recorded it and blogged it all under an hour. That blog has gotten a 100 percent awesome response. It’s not about the chords or the melody.
   As to Gaiman’s influence on her work, Palmer says, “I looook at my work through an interesting lens. Nowadays, I consider a lot of parts of my life to be my work, my blog, my relationship with my fans, the way I travel. A lot of things have become harder to separate from the usual average singer-songwriter. I’m kinda making an art out of a lifestyle. Neil has been incredible in that he’s the first person I’ve been in a relationship with who totally accepts and understands that and how I do things. It’s bolstered me to have such a strong support, instead of someone I need to constantly explain things to. I have someone I can get excited with
    Do they have similar temperaments?
   “In some ways we do,” she says “and it other ways we’re day and night. Neil is very British in stereotypical ways and I am very American in very stereotypical ways. I am very blunt and will basically say whatever is on my mind at any given time. And Neil can be very reserved and polite. That being said, I think we really appreciate each other’s propensities in one direction or another and we keep each other in check.”

. Note: The entire run of shows is sold out, meaning you, if you don't possess them already, may need to lurk outside Oberon or hit the tickets seection of www.craigslist.com .

Note: The Dresden Dolls - believe it or not - will re-united. I talked to Palmer earlier this year about whether to refer to her as the former singer-pianist of that goth/punk/cabaret group and she debated a bit, but decided it was time to put the nail in that coffin. Well, she - and drummer Brian Viglione - undecided and they will play the Wilbur Theatre Tuesday Nov. 2 and Wed. Nov. 3. See www.wilburtheatre.com for info and tix.

Arrow St., Cambridge, 617) 547-8300  www.amrep.org