The Cabaret Paradox
The latest revival of Cabaret in New York brands itself as “immersive” theatre.[1] It’s one of the first things the actor Eddie Redmayne, who stars as the Emcee, mentions as he traverses the late-night talk show circuit to generate buzz. Both he and his character invite potential attendees not as mere spectators, but as guests, exhorting us to leave our troubles outside. And how can we resist; for inside the Kit Kat Club—Tom Scutt recently won the Tony for scenic design for his extensive renovations of the August Wilson Theatre—“life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful,” as the Emcee proclaims in the opening number. Before the first note is sung, the production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, is already a maximalist, multisensory escapade. When guests arrive at the entrance, ushers hand us shots of cherry schnapps. As we walk down a dim corridor, past lounges hidden behind velvet curtains for those willing to pay progressively more for three “tiers” of “dining experiences,”[2] to what had been the theatre’s lobby, we are dazzled by sumptuous décor and pre-show programming oozing Weimar-era and ’70s disco nightclub vibes.[3]
The centerpiece of this period-appropriate excess is a circular, concentrically revolving platform. Amid tiny café tables surrounded by more traditional theatre seating, the performers are spun around, as if a lazy Susan laden with morsels both tantalizing and grotesque. This aphoristic bit of staging not only evokes a merry-go-round—befitting the circus-like atmosphere of Berlin as the city teeters between the exhilarating decadence of the Weimar Republic, the economic turmoil of postwar Germany, and the inexorable rise of fascism—it also creates a hall of mirrors effect. As the audience is seated more or less in a circle around the performers, our own reactions are reflected back at us through those of our peers. It is a clever new take on an old idea; Hal Prince, producer and director of the original 1966 production of Cabaret, unveiled a gigantic mirror on the proscenium stage of the Broadhurst Theatre before and after the performance to implicate the audience in this fable about the perils of political disengagement.[4]
Throughout the performance, Redmayne, who throws himself into character as the Emcee, slithers back and forth between the café tables and the stage, improvising interactions with guests to draw us ever deeper into the experience. The Emcee, after all, is an allegory, the very device that will be used to implicate us for our self-absorption, complacency, and cowardice. We watch, abetted by the Emcee’s knowing asides, as the earnest Clifford Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood) struggles to make a living as a writer, the hedonistic Sally Bowles (Gayle Rankin) pursues fame at all costs, and the agreeable Fräulein Schneider (Bebe Neuwirth) abandons her Jewish fiancé (Steven Skybell) in the face of anti-Semitism, until finally the Emcee himself succumbs to Nazism.
The timing of this revival feels especially apt. The rise of extremism during a divisive era was one reason why Prince, in the midst of the civil rights movement and as the Vietnam War escalated in the 1960s, wanted not only to tell such a tale, but to tell it through a similarly perilous historical moment. Cabaret’s current producers are not alone; the focal point of Carnegie Hall’s 2023–24 season was a series of over 100 events at institutions across New York City under the theme “Fall of the Weimar Republic: Dancing on the Precipice.” Joe Berlinger’s docuseries Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial (2024) and Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest (2023), too, warn us about the chilling echoes between past and present. Didactic art abounds.
And yet, if Cabaret hopes to instruct, immersion may not amount to implication. Set in the waning days of the Weimar Republic, the musical—book by Joe Masteroff, music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb—captures the era’s spirit through pastiche. When Prince secured the rights to turn John Van Druten’s play, I Am a Camera (1951)—an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin—into Cabaret, he wanted “a radically different sound” than standard 1960s Broadway fare, a sound “that evoked the Berlin of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.”[5] Prince was referring to the operas that Weill composed with the playwright Bertolt Brecht in the late 1920s and early ’30s, which regularly starred Lenya, the actor-singer who was Weill’s wife. (Among her numerous credits in film, opera, and theatre, Lenya originated the role of Fräulein Schneider.) Paradoxically, then, Cabaret draws from an experimental theatre movement that questioned the notion that music and theatre could implicate through immersion.
The vibrancy of urban centers like Berlin belied the pall the First World War cast across Europe. Weimar Germany, never on firm footing, became increasingly more fragile as its economy collapsed, which made its thriving cultural scene all the more astonishing. Accordingly, the many new approaches to various artistic mediums, from furniture to literature, stemmed not from optimism about the present or future, but rather disillusionment with the recent past. Composers and playwrights, in particular, were wary of German Romanticism. Its insistence on inner subjectivity over objective reality, on emotions over reason, and on art for art’s sake—as exemplified by Richard Wagner’s operas, those immersive, all-consuming total artworks (Gesamtkunstwerk)—seemed inconsequential, if not cruel, when everyday Germans were suffering socioeconomically. Brecht, indeed, compared Romantic opera and concert music, which he deemed “dramatic theatre,” to narcotics that induce audiences “into a peculiar doped state, wholly passive, sunk without trace, seemingly in the grip of a severe poisoning attack.”[6]
Brecht’s antidote was “epic theatre,” a cause to which he had many recruits, including Weill. This style
does not make use of the “identification” of the spectator with the play [or opera] . . . and has a different point of view also towards other psychological effects a play may have on an audience, as, for example, towards the “catharsis.” Catharsis is not the main object . . . In fact, it has as a purpose the “teaching” of the spectator a certain quite practical attitude; we have to make it possible for him to take a critical attitude while he is in the theatre (as opposed to a subjective attitude of becoming completely “entangled” in what is going on).[7]
In theory, Cabaret evinces many characteristics of a didactic opera in the epic style. Rather than being driven by a linear plot, the work is a series of montages. Scenes cut, without transition, back and forth between the Kit Kat Club, Fräulein Schneider’s boarding house, and the train station. For Weill and Brecht, such a narrative structure was a deliberate anti-Wagnerian ploy. Dramatic opera was able to dope audiences because music and plot were interdependent. The latter emphasized development of a character or situation in an organic, realistic—or at least imitatively realistic—way, and the former enhanced that development of the drama.
The integration of text and music is as basic in Romantic opera as it is in contemporary musicals. The overture, for example, introduces a melodic fragment that sounds complete once the character enters with a musical song or operatic aria, and that same melody will develop as the character develops. The music intensifies—through some combination of dynamics, chromaticism, and orchestration—as the character’s feelings intensify or as the plot thickens. Weill and Brecht strove to eliminate this illustrative power of music precisely because it enables spectators emotionally to identify with the events onstage, thereby preventing them from taking a “critical attitude” and undermining the didactic purpose of epic theatre.
This mosaic of independent scenes thus separates the text from the music, releasing the latter from its dramatic function of “pumping up the action from within, glazing over the transitions, supplying the background for events, and stirring up passions,” according to Weill.[8] The moments in Cabaret where the plot does thicken—Cliff agreeing to let Sally crash in his room at Fräulein Schneider’s; Cliff realizing that he has been smuggling contraband for the Nazis; the attack on the store owned by the Jewish grocer, Herr Schultz—happen in between the musical numbers as spoken dialogue. The songs that follow, as Brecht would characterize it, “report” in order to teach, or at least influence, how the spectator should feel about the situation.
A consequence of reporting a feeling rather than involving the spectator in the emotional turmoil is the breaking of the fourth wall, another feature of epic theatre of which there are many instances in Cabaret. After Herr Schultz’s store is vandalized, Fräulein Schneider opts to end their engagement rather than suffer Nazi persecution. (Again, this plot point occurs as dialogue.) She then sings, “What Would You Do?”; though Cliff and Sally are in the scene, it is clearly intended for the audience. The song is not a typical reaction from someone who, in the winter of her life, finally finds true love only to lose it. Rather than raging at the audience, she, per epic theatre, “reports,” framing her situation as a counterfactual and asking them to reflect on what they would do “if you were me.” The music that accompanies her, while melancholy, suggests an elegant dance—a slow cha-cha, perhaps—that is often orchestrated with a small band of string instruments plus an accordion, adding to the unexpected charm.
With its jazz and popular dance music inflected idioms, and a small orchestra to play them, the sound of Cabaret is not that of a conventional opera. It is, however, what Weill and Brecht wanted for their operas, which were musical pastiches like Cabaret. Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), the most successful epic-style opera commercially and critically,[9] not only relied heavily on American popular styles like jazz, big band, and Tin Pan Alley for its broad appeal—European audiences were mad for transatlantic cultural exports during the interwar years—but the duo thought the simplicity and directness of the music would not distract the spectator from learning the opera’s critical lesson.
Ultimately, all of these trappings of epic theatre serve to “defamiliarize” or “alienate” the spectator from the artwork. Brecht coined the now-famous term Verfremdung, the epic theatre equivalent of the literary device “defamiliarization,” which originated with the Russian Formalists. In most operas and musicals, we are not used to the actors addressing us directly, reporting their feelings rather than entangling us in them, piecemeal storylines, and music that doesn’t quite fit either the genre or the emotional stakes. But the very oddity of such a theatrical experience engages our reason, not emotion, so that we can be persuaded by the argument or lesson being offered.
Cabaret may, in theory, have didactic potential, but as it is performed in the current revival, that potential remains unrealized. Indeed, an immersive interpretation makes it a familiar dramatic opera as opposed to a defamiliar epic opera, shortening the rational distance the audience needs to process how exactly we are implicated in the crimes committed onstage. Redmayne and Rankin are perhaps too committed to their roles, forcing us to identify with the Emcee and Sally rather than learn from them. Both tend to exaggerate the delivery of their musical numbers, taking uncomfortably slow tempi at the start of their songs, many of which have built-in slow introductory sections, as if waiting for the audience really to settle in. In the softer parts, Redmayne overly shapes the phrases, singing the final syllable so softly that, at times, it couldn’t be heard. In the louder parts, Rankin screams the high notes rather than sings them. Though they play the secondary characters, Neuwirth and Skybell are the highlight and the poignant heart of the show, their performances striking a balance between objective reportage and expressive poetry. The overall psychological effect of Frecknall’s Cabaret, to borrow Brecht’s words, is that of catharsis. It is a relief, if we see ourselves in the Emcee and Sally, that people just like us choose the path of least resistance in the face of authoritarianism. Immersive, emotional identification absolves rather than implicates.
[1] Diep Tran, “See How Cabaret Renovated the August Wilson Theatre,” Playbill, April 26, 2024; Dylan Parent, “In Cabaret, Set and Costume Designer Tom Scott Wanted to Celebrate Queer Individuality,” Playbill, June 5, 2024.
[2] “Food & Drink,” Kit Kat Club, August Wilson Theatre, accessed July 2, 2024.
[3] Dan Piepenbring, “How a Broadway Theater Was Remade into a Queer Cabaret,” New York Times, April 23, 2024.
[4] Douglas Reside, “‘Cabaret’: The Always Immersive Musical,” The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, NYPL Blog, May 8, 2024.
[5] Keith Garebian, The Making of Cabaret (Oxford, 2011), p. 16.
[6] Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by John Willett (New York, 1964), p. 89.
[7] Brecht, p. 78.
[8] Kurt Weill, “Zeitoper,” Melos 7 (March 1928): 106–108; translated in Kim H. Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe (Ann Arbor, 1979), pp. 462–465: 464.
[9] Die Dreigroschenoper had over 300 performances in Berlin within a year during its initial run. By 1933, it racked up 130 productions across Germany and an estimated 40,000 performances abroad by 1937. Marc Blitzstein edited and translated it into The Threepenny Opera in 1954, which became an off-Broadway hit that earned Lenya a Tony.