CHICAGO has clicked its fingers in York three times in five years, but this week is your first chance to come to the Cabaret in a professional production in that time.

Kander & Ebb’s politically acerbic musical was last staged in the city six years ago by Stagecoach Youth Theatre York, in Trinity Hall.

Inevitably, Bill Kenwright’s touring show carries more of a big-budget bang, and the Grand Opera House comes into its own when hosting the big musicals – let’s have more of them now that the Ambassador Theatre Group has bought the theatre.

Cabaret looks very much at home here, as of course does Wayne Sleep, a regular frequenter of the Opera House stage, now recovered from the injury that confined him to a wheelchair-bound grand entry in Marguerite Porter’s Summer Gala in July.

Hair as black as coal, face whitened and make-up startling, he is rigged up in lederhosen and basque: a distinctive, twinkling interpretation of the impish Emcee that goes on to be more overtly humorous and ultimately less sinister than Joel Grey in the Bob Fosse film.

His accent, like Hitler, spreads out from Germany but the tone is suitably waspish and camp, and his vertical three-in-a-bed with two rather taller ladies of the night in the Kit Kat Club is one of the night’s high points.

Katrina Lindsay’s design, all blacks and metals, evokes both the decadence and gaiety of 1931 Berlin and the creeping shadow of insidious Nazi propaganda. Rows of single naked bulbs light up the boxed rooms of both the saucy, seedy club and Fraulein Schneider’s (Jenny Logan) outwardly respectable lodgings, where impecunious nightclub singer Sally Bowles (Siobhan Dillon) takes up residence with newly arrived American novelist Clifford Bradshaw (York actor Henry Luxemburg).

Still on the rise from finishing “second runner-up” in the BBC’s talent-spotting How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria?, Dillon sings with drama, sensuality and passion and moves alluringly and although she could have more of a Mayfair air, she nevertheless captures the essence of her flighty, headstrong interpretation of a prickly English rose. Luxemburg conveys inner turmoil beneath outward restraint, playing Bradshaw with vintage Thirties’ film mannerisms.

Javier De Frutos’s choreography is as provocative, slinky, menacing and hot as you would expect from the short, sharp shock of his curtailed tenure at Phoenix Dance Theatre, while Rufus Norris’s direction brings the persecution of the Jews to the fore, not only in the treatment of fruit trader Herr Schulz (Matt Zimmerman), but in his echoing use of nudity at the finale to both halves, as chiselled Teutonic strength makes way for the limp bodies of the gas chamber.

Norris’s Cabaret is dapper, decadent and dazzling, dark, devilish and disturbing, and better for Dillon’s arrival since this horny, humorous but haunting show’s run at the Leeds Grand last year.

• Cabaret, Grand Opera House, York, until November 21. Box office: 0844 847 2322