Welcome to Berlin

You know, I was a pretty big fan of the original American Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, back in the day. At least, I remember getting anxious about how the five regular rangers were going to defeat Tommy, the evil green ranger (hey, that episode was a two-parter!) I just watched the intro on YouTube, for old time’s sake, and, man. Just, yeah. Since when did the immediate response to “evil is attacking this planet!” become “we need some teenagers with attitude!”? I mean, seriously, I remember trying to get stuff done in high school, and it seems like teenagers without attitude would be a much safer bet. Or, maybe “we need some trained professionals with skill!” Now that might work best.

Anyhow, here is why John Kander and Fred Ebb’s* musical Cabaret is one of my favourites:

Most stories that either depict the actual rise of Nazism (The Sound of Music, Schindler’s List, Swing Kids) or a metaphorical version of Nazism (the Harry Potter series) point to the brave resistance beset with murderous foes and say, “This could have been you!”

A handful, like the plays The Diary of Anne Frank and Bent, and the graphic novel Maus, point to the wretches wearing yellow stars and pink triangles and say, “This could have been you!”

Cabaret points to the man wearing the swastika armband and jackboots.

(Here there be spoilers, though I tried to avoid them where I could!)

The plot is as follows: Cliff, a would-be American writer, moves to Berlin in the early 1930s. There, he gets caught up in the riotous nightlife at the Kit Kat Club, where he falls in love with Sally Bowles, a hedonistic English showgirl. However, as the Nazi party rises to power, life for the clientele of the Kit Kat Club – and for everyone else – changes irrevocably. The story is based on Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographic I Am a Camera, and it’s introduced/narrated/framed by the enigmatic Emcee of the Kit Kat Club.

When you portray Nazis – or Hitler, or Stalin, or Pol Pot – in works of fiction, you often tread a fine line between humanizing their crimes and excusing them. While I think the former is desirable, the latter is certainly indefensible. Cabaret works through its subtlety: just like the audience “knows” that the dancers at the nightclub prostitute themselves after their number’s over, the audience also “knows” that, after the end of the play, Jewish Herr Schultz will probably be murdered in a concentration camp. Neither of these things is shown onstage, and neither needs to be. In the same way the Emcee’s songs are risqué but not pornographic (“Deedle-deedle-dee, two ladies! Deedle-deedle-dee, two ladies! Deedle-deedle-dee, and I’m the only man, ja!”), the Nazi characters’ actions are disturbing but not revolting.

I think it’s this subtlety that makes Cabaret a favourite of amateur directors. The real master of ceremonies is the director; change a character’s reaction to a particular line, and you change the meaning of the play. A big “moment” of Cabaret that absolutely has to be well-planned is the first time the audience sees someone turn around and find out they’re wearing a swastika armband. There are several different places this can happen, and each one implies something different about the nature of Nazism and how Hitler came to power.

For instance, in the version I saw on Wednesday (produced by UC Follies here at the University of Toronto), the director chose to reveal the swastika on the arm of a child early on during the first act. This, to me, completely changed the nature of the show. In most productions of Cabaret, the pleasure-seeking, laissez-faire, selfish ethic embodied in the Kit Kat Club is the seething cauldron from which the acceptance of Nazism bubbles up to the surface; by making the first Nazi character a nameless kid, rather than one of the adult characters to whom the audience has been introduced, the staging seemed to deny or overlook this connection.

(Sidenote: Cabaret’s presentation of sexuality is pretty interesting. It includes homosexuality and bisexuality, as well as polyamory and even bestiality**. Diverse sexualities are portrayed as normal and good, which is, perhaps, why Cabaret also seems to be a favourite of LGBT companies. The seamy underside of the Kit Kat Club isn’t any particular sexual act; it’s not caring about the suffering or humiliation of other human beings as long as you get pleasure out of it.)

The UC Follies production also made other subtleties more explicit, to the detriment (I thought) of the play as a whole: naughty-but-PG13 songs wound up with unnecessarily explicit choreography, in which characters pelvic thrust through the whole number, or grabbed each other’s genitalia, or pretended to put their tongues… er, I’m sure you get the idea. Mostly, this seemed like a bad idea to me because it made the Emcee aggressively sexual. Now, the Emcee always has a sexual aspect – it’s written into the book, and, besides, it’s his job to welcome people into the nightclub and make sure they don’t leave before they spend their money. But, usually, his relationship with the audience is a winking one – “hey, we both understand what this really means, eh?” *nudge nudge* Cabaret depends on the audience members being able to identify with the Emcee even as he does things they don’t agree with. This means the Emcee has to be trying not to shock, but to titillate***.

Another of my favourite things about Cabaret is how its most believable and touching romance is between an elderly widower and an elderly widow. Most of the time, in musicals, old people get shafted: they’re comic relief, or benign parental figures, or both. But, in Cabaret, characters’ age just another aspect of who they are. Age doesn’t prevent people from having sexual or emotional needs; just because love is centred around the gift of a pineapple rather than hawt sexay-ness doesn’t make it any less valid. And age does matter: how is it fair to expect a seventy-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis to be able to pack up and leave Berlin like a twenty-year-old?

Anyway.

This has been a rambling entry of ramble-riffic rambling, but, just to get back to the opening: by far the most intriguing thing about Cabaret is its way of grabbing you and showing you that, hey, being a Nazi would have been easy. Just sing the pretty song, or laugh along with the joke, and, as long as you don’t really listen to the punch line, you’re still okay. And that, naturally, is the chilling part: who has time to take apart every word of a joke, or pay close attention to the lyrics of a catchy tune? Books and plays that portray Nazis as soulless monsters take the easy way out – if you point and laugh at the unattractive guests on Jerry Springer, you can comfort yourself with the idea that ugliness is something that happens to other people. If you look in the mirror, on the other hand… well.

Auf wiedersehen!

* You may remember them best as the composer and lyricist responsible for Chicago.

** Well… okay, that might be stretching the gorilla number a little far, but still…

*** Hee hee, I said, “titillate”!