As you wait for the performance of "Cabaret" at your table, perhaps sipping a drink, your eyes move to the stage. There cast members ready for the show. Women, dressed in camisoles, torn white stockings and open short silk robes stretch provocatively or wander listlessly as if trying to come out of a stupor. They smoke cigarettes or strike up a conversation with someone in the audience. You notice bruises, a sickly pallor and dark rings under their eyes that imply drug use. On a wrought-iron black platform that's part of the stage, a trombone player from the orchestra, dressed in a cut-off shirt, tattoos evident, sits on a chair. One of the girls suggestively straddles his lap, facing him as he strokes her stomach.

Willkommen to the new "Cabaret," which opened Wednesday at the Wilshire Theatre. Gone is the world-weary irony and the between-the-lines coyness of the 1966 Broadway Tony Award-winning production, or Bob Fosse's 1972 Oscar-winning film, both of which told the story of second-rate singer Sally Bowles during the rise of Nazism in Germany. Here, divine decadence has been replaced with risque business that has deadly consequences.

When the Emcee (Norbert Butz) of the Kit Kat Klub tells you "to leave your troubles outside/ so, life is disappointing/ we have no troubles here," there is no insinuating glamour of the earlier versions. Entering wearing a long black leather coat that opens, revealing a bare chest with red sequined nipples, the Emcee exudes an exuberant vulgarity. He operates throughout the show like a street-corner pusher, luring in new marks while keeping the users hooked. No matter how much the world is crumbling, or how ugly it becomes, the cabaret is a strung-out junkie's dream.

Conceived by Sam Mendes, this reinvented "Cabaret" remains as entertaining as ever, thanks to the wonderful Fred Ebb-John Kander score that evokes the age of Brecht and Weill and jazzy production numbers, but it also packs more punch. By placing most of the audience at tables, Mendes creates a setting in which they are implicated in all of the club's tawdriness as they laugh and applaud the erotic gyrations of the chorus of men and women, who feign an assortment of sexual positions throughout the show. And the choreography verges on the chaotic at times rather than the coolness of Fosse. (There are a few numbers done in storm-trooper boots.)

And don't go expecting to see the highly stylized sheen that Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli imprinted on the roles of the Emcee and Sally. Their cabaret was a place where Marlene Dietrich might stop by. This one is more like a trip to an S&M bar, lash marks and all. If Sally possessed the voice of Liza, she wouldn't be at the Kit Kat Klub.

This Sally (Teri Hatcher) is a second-rate performer, a cocaine and sex addict with an exaggerated and misplaced sense of sophistication. When she talks her way into the room of aspiring writer Cliff Bradshaw (Rick Holmes) during the number "Perfectly Marvelous," it's her survival instinct at work. She's a girl of minor talent who has used her feminine wiles and some time on her back to get by. Like the club, she is walled off from the real world. Hurts and slights are quickly covered over with jokes and grandiose delusions. Deep down, she knows her limitations but refuses to see them.

Playing a role like that is a difficult challenge (how do you play second-rate without seeming second-rate?), but Hatcher, who is making her stage debut, is up to the task. Though she never commands the role, she commands your attention when on stage. During her first production number, "Don't Tell Mama," she oozes little-girl charm. On the thin and pale character, it quickly becomes a little-girl-lost quality in those few moments when she's not performing or trying to charm someone. And while no great song stylist, Hatcher's vocals work well within the musical's dramatic context. More about that later.

One thing this new "Cabaret" hasn't overcome is some of the narrative problems of the original. Based on Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin," a collection of stories, and John Van Druten's "I Am a Camera," a stage adaptation of them, the original musical is more of a photo album.

The story revolves around events on the stage of the Kit Kat Club, the insidious growth of Nazism and two doomed relationships -- the strange attraction of homosexual Cliff for Sally, and Cliff's elderly landlady Fraulein Schneider's (Barbara Andres) romance with Herr Schultz (Dick Latessa), a Jewish fruit merchant. At times, scenes play more like individual snapshots than part of the whole picture, especially some of the Schneider-Schultz moments, as charming as they may be. (The movie solved the problem by eliminating their relationship.)

But charming isn't really what this "Cabaret" is about. Mendes uses the Emcee throughout as some perverse Greek chorus in an attempt to tie the narrative together.

As the Emcee, Butz has two tough acts to follow -- Grey, of course, and Alan Cumming, who originated this raunchier androgynous incarnation in London and New York. It is a particularly demanding role and really pivotal to the success of the show, and despite a few rough edges at the beginning on Wednesday night, Butz turns in a strong performance, eventually revealing a human face beneath the greasepaint.

That is what "Cabaret" is about. At the end of the first act, during an engagement party for Schneider and Schultz, Ernst (Andy Taylor), a Nazi, is about to stomp off after learning that Schultz is Jewish and has warned Schneider about the consequences of marrying him. One of the boarding-house residents, Fraulein Kost (Jeanine Morick), who has been doing her patriotic duty by entertaining sailors in her room, lures Ernst back by getting him to sing with her the stirring Nazi anthem "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." Then she asks everyone to join in. Since we have joined in the fun up until then, it is a disquieting moment.

The performances in "Cabaret" are solid. And Morick and Latessa display fine voices. But a fine voice is not what Hatcher, who is known for her film and television roles, needs when she tears through the show's title number. Wearing a short black dress, looking gaunt and in need of a fix, she practically howls as she tries to hold herself together. It is a stunning moment. The irony in the song is replaced with a sense of inevitable doom as Sally recites the story of Elsie's death from "pills and liquor" and then stomps off. It isn't often that you can turn a classic on its head.