Prompt #11: Cabaret - Unpacking Complicated Reactions

Cabaret was a challenging experience. As I crossed the threshold of the theatre, I entered the Kit Kat Club, a fantasy world. It was like the adults-only version of a REALLY well-designed queue at Disney World. As we waited for the performance to begin, my friends and I were encouraged to explore the theatre, which had been transformed into the club that would be the setting of the musical. Dancers and musicians (part of the “prologue act” of the show) performed behind beaded screens and atop bars (see images of the set below). One of the dancers passed me and, noticing my attention, turned to stare at me with large eyes. I was startled!

Red Bar at the Kit Kat Club, London

Gold Bar at the Kit Kat Club, London

The prologue dancing was captivating and immersive, and I felt optimistic about the rest of the performance. When we took our seats, I noticed that the stage and seating were truly unique. The ground floor is modeled after a traditional nightclub! Two-topper tables filled the space, and each had a light that doubled as a landline phone. Balcony seating surrounded the circular stage on both sides. The physical setting of the show necessitated that the actors perform in the round. The stage design encouraged circular acting. (It consisted of three concentric circles which raised, lowered, and rotated at will). The show prompted me to think a lot about how live theatre (and music!) hinges on the physical space it occupies. At Cabaret, “life is a Cabaret”, in that every detail of the setting and show places the audience into a 1930’s Berlin burlesque club (see below for an image of the theatre).

The first half of the show felt like exposition. It introduced the characters and established the Kit Kat Club as a literal and metaphorical escape from the troubles of life in post-WW1 Berlin. (See below for an image of a previous cast of Cabaret at the Playhouse Theatre). In one of the first numbers, cabaret dancers of all gender identities are introduced by Emcee in graphically sexual terms. Their unique personhood is completely neglected in these introductions, as we are meant to view them as objects of escapist sexual fantasy. The first part of Act 1 features a series of cabaret numbers which repeatedly place these performers in overtly sexual positions, circumstances, and dance numbers. Off the stage, escapist revelry continues. It is clear from context that most characters spend evenings at the club or other parties. We learn virtually nothing about characters like Bobby and Victor (among others) off-stage, aside from clues to their sexualities. Emcee, for example, exists in the show not as a man, but rather as an abstract entity who does not exist outside of the Kit Kat Club. (Here is a digestible article on Emcee’s shape-shifting, illusive nature, per Eddie Redmayne, who first reimagined the character on the West End.) 

The fictitious Kit Kat Club represents a means of self-expression for people of queer identities in depression-era Germany. But it took fun and affirmation to a debilitating place. In my view, the hyper-sexualization performers were subjected to at the Kit Kat Club in Cabaret (and real-life burlesque clubs like it) was incredibly demeaning. The show perpetuates the hyper-sexualization and objectification of characters by omitting character development and including gratuitously sexual scenes. Several times, dialogue or costumes compared highly sexualized cabaret dancers to children, which stripped characters of their agency, dignity, and responsibility for their actions.

The second half of the show was less uncomfortable and far more emotionally intense. For Sally and many of the other cabaret performers, free lifestyles and the Kit Kat Club become tactics (and indeed vices) to avoid confronting the reality of the Nazi party’s rise to power. Sally refuses to listen to Cliff as he reads about politics in the newspaper. She laughs it off when Fraulein Schneider breaks off her engagement to Herr Schultz for fear of his Jewish heritage. She refuses to flee to America with Cliff and instead gets an abortion behind his back and returns to her job at the Kit Kat Club. Sally’s poignant line “Life is a Cabaret, Old Chum, Come to the Cabaret!” seems to me like a desperate attempt to recapture the escapist, indulgent lifestyle that she had enjoyed.

The club invented for Cabaret became a reality in 1994, when the Austrian explicit filmmaker Simon Thaur opened a Kit Kat Club in Berlin. The new club’s culture (not unlike the one shown in Cabaret) emphasized unencumbered sexuality. In the last scene of the musical, when the characters reemerge in uniform (all Nazi’s?), it becomes clear that the life Sally had known at the cabaret had always been an illusion. Granted, the final scene of the show is incredibly ambiguous. But the way I interpret it, Cabaret becomes a critique of the avoidance tactics inherent to a Kit Kat Club lifestyle. Why folks like Simon Thaur left the theatre with romantic notions about the club is truly beyond me.

I didn't enjoy watching Cabaret. I probably won't see it again. But I'm glad that I did see it, and I expect I'll be mulling it over for weeks to come. Maybe that's a mark of decent theatre?