CABARET
Cabaret, the thrilling musical about life in and around the underground music club scene in Berlin, 1929-1930, will be performed in a real Cabaret space this summer, as the opening show of the 30th anniversary season of Summer Cabaret.
Director Anna Jones says that Cabaret is "a play to be dangerous in." The production will fill the entire space of the Cabaret theatre, with Kit Kat Girls operating the spotlights, and telephones on all the tables, just like there were in ultra-modern Berlin, which at the tumultuous time when Cabaret takes place had more telephones than any other city in the world. Audiences who come to the show, seated at the Cabaret tables, will be surrounded by the decadent activity of the Kit Kat Club: the antics of the Emcee in his makeup and corset; the sexy songs of Sally Bowles; the sinister rumblings of the impending political disasters seen in the behavior of Ernst, the mild-mannered Nazi criminal. Jones charts the course of the play from a place of euphoria, wild abandon, brazen political satire and sexual freedom, all the way to its tragic conclusion, where censorship and repression have overtaken the atmosphere of the Club, and Hitler’s fascist regime has begun its terrible destruction of human life and love.
The unsettling swings of fortune which the characters in the play undergo echo the chaos of that era in the Weimar Republic: a time of severe social and economic turmoil, when in a single year, 1923, the exchange rate of the German mark went from four marks to a dollar, to four billion. Hitler’s rise to power was facilitated by this crisis, and the resultant wave of nationalism which spread across Germany, perhaps as a response to the shame experienced by many after their devastating economic loss. As the Emcee sings, ironically, "Money makes the world go around." In 1929, the Great Depression hit America, the birthplace of Cabaret’s wandering novelist, Cliff, who comes to Berlin in search of inspiration and falls in love with the English nightclub singer Sally Bowles. (Cliff is based on Christopher Isherwood, the auther of The Berlin Stories, the book upon which Cabaret is originally based.) Cliff, Sally, and the other characters in the play, lead ordinary lives in extraordinary times.
In its collection of fabulous and at times disturbing musical numbers, Cabaret effectively presents a range of emotional responses to the political situation, from Sally’s indulgent apathy, to Herr Schultz’s fatal optimism, to Fraulein Schneider’s melancholy pragmatism. Throughout it all, the Emcee gives us his running commentary, in the form of such great numbers as "The Money Song", "Two Ladies", and "Tomorrow Belongs to Me." These were the songs that garnered eight Tony Awards for the original Broadway production of Cabaret in 1966, and four more for the revival in 1998, which ran for 1,166 performances. Now Cabaret comes to the Summer Cabaret, with a wonderful cast of actors from the Yale School of Drama, and a director willing to explore the disquieting resonances the play has for us in America today.
Alena Smith, June 2004