I’ll forgive a lot when it comes to my favorite musical, that dark Masteroff/Kander and Ebb jewel “Cabaret.”

Last season’s staging at the Desert Stages Theatre was a little too low-budget, and Phoenix Theatre’s production earlier this season was a little too high-budget. But the sparkle and drama of the show — a story about tragic love and escapism in Germany against the approaching horrors that close the Weimar Republic — not to mention its alternatingly gorgeous, silly and haunting score, shone through regardless.

This season’s second go-round of “Cabaret” comes courtesy director Peter Hill and Fountain Hills Community Theater, and it too comes with a laundry list of flaws, largely forgivable and mostly due to the constraints of casting for community theater. But it’s a production that still left me adequately chilled — and grinning ear to ear — on my way out the door.

Stefan Linder plays the Emcee of Berlin’s fictional, tawdry Kit Kat Klub cabaret, a Gothic Cheshire cat of a role — equal parts jester and omniscient spectre — that in stagings these days often threatens to steal the spotlight from Kit Kat starlet Sally Bowles. Linder, with a heavy Austrian accent that’s rendered him near-unintelligible in other Valley productions that here is actually an asset, doesn’t quite have the bravado and wicked charm that the Emcee calls for, so his part feels largely deliberate and tightly directed, though still uncertain.

It doesn’t help matters that Linder’s costumes are often little more than shirtless tuxedoes — a look that giggles Chippendale dancer — and the Pan-Cake makeup slathered on his face makes him resemble the puppet star of TV’s “Madame’s Place.”

This Sally Bowles, Debbie Brown, isn’t so severe a case, but she’s played with little of the sexiness and Holly Golightly flippancy that pays off when she suffers the star-turning meltdown of the title tune — an ironic ditty that serves as the emotionally crushing climax of the musical. Instead, between a dirty strawberry pixie ’do and bright red lipstick, Brown unintentionally plays Sally with a mild obnoxiousness and the cold eyes of a small-time con artist, attaching to American writer Cliff Bradshaw knowing full well she’ll leave him like all the others.

That said, Brown’s got a warm set of pipes that wrap deliciously around songs such as “Perfectly Marvelous” and “Don’t Tell Mama.”

At the cabaret, the Emcee and Sally are backed by a quartet of (seemingly) scandalously young Kit Kat Girls; dancing and crooning in belly-baring lingerie, they look as if the printer confused pages from the Victoria’s Secret and Delia’s catalogs. Which, depending on your point of view, is either a detriment or a highlight.

Cliff, the skeptical innocent, is an easy role to overlook. But Hill and actor Michael Stewart (a guy of indeterminate age, looking sharp in an old-style suit and suspenders, singing amiably) make a strong case to pay more attention to the character, even if Hill decides to sidestep Cliff’s bisexuality here and, in the process, thins him out a bit.

What makes this production of “Cabaret” ultimately succeed is the vibe that Director Hill didn’t feel any competition, any pressure, knowing he’s doing a musical that’s earned so much buzz at other theaters recently.

He’s free to let wife Noel Irick, as the woeful widow Fraulein Schneider, turn on the sassy comedy wherever possible in the first act, then reach for soap opera dramatics in the second’s “What Would You Do?” Hill also isn’t above dressing his Emcee as the Frank N. Furter of the Third Reich to wake us up after intermission.

Hill is well aware he’s whipping up community theater, and instead of doing what he can to hide the rough edges, he’s happy instead to nurture the show’s many golden moments and let his cast members enjoy themselves. Audiences — and I — can’t help but fall in line and forgive.