If you’ve never been so lucky as to watch a production of Cabaret live, I wish nothing but the worst on you because it should’ve been me. But if you haven’t, then what’s your problem? Watch here, then come back.
Okay, great, welcome back. Cabaret, as you now know, is meant to fully immerse you in the experience and blur the line between over-the-top theatrics and the grittiness of reality. Every rewatch only solidifies this feeling for me, as I’ve come to notice that every character reflects a different type of person during polarized political periods.
Nobody thinks they’re the villain, and even from the outside, no single character can be pinned to blame. And so it goes in the reality we live in as well.
The MC/Emcee/Master of Ceremonies
“Leave your troubles outside. We have no troubles here. Here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful.”
To me, Emcee exemplifies the frivolous algorithm that’s keeping you too entertained and idle to actually look up and notice how quickly things around you are deteriorating until the algorithm itself has been co-opted and under the government’s thumb, no longer belonging to itself. Through increasingly racy cabaret performances, you as a viewer are desensitized to the absurdity and horror of what’s happening right outside the club’s walls.
I could sit here and give a description of the number, but the escalation within the song “If You Could See Her” depicts this feeling perfectly, and got an audible gasp out of me on my first watch.
“Bleibe! Reste! Stay!” (translates to: Stay! Stay! Stay!)
[Huge spoiler alert: the final scene reveals Emcee, along with the entire Kit Kat Club, within a concentration camp.]
Cliff Bradshaw
“Welcome to Berlin, ‘famous novelist’…”
First things first, I only know Clifford Bradshaw, not whoever this supposed “Brian Roberts” of the 1972 film adaptation is.
Anyways, Cliff represents people who can recognize that something is wrong but don’t take the steps towards lasting change. What would a step even look like for Cliff? He’s a writer; he watches, narrates, but never acts or publishes. Cliff sees fleeing “home” from Berlin as his and Sally’s only option, but fails to see that, to Sally, Berlin is home; how could she be expected to flip her world around overnight just like that? Running from something doesn’t change it, and it can leave you a stranger to yourself.
“The party is over. It was a lot of fun, but it’s over! And it’s going to get a lot worse, so how can we stay here?”
Sally Bowles
“Life is a cabaret, old chum. Come to the cabaret!”
Sally’s character is a glimpse into how ambivalence so quickly becomes dangerous. She lives in a culture that emphasizes living hedonistically, and politics has no place in it. She jokes that the owner of the Kit Kat Club is just “the man she’s living with…this week!” and reframes her lifestyle as that of a “free” woman, not one who is simply doing what she can in an ever increasingly unkind and unfair world. In the end, she stays in Berlin, and we never see where her life went once the cabaret, along with her career in it, was shut down. While the show never says what happens to her, the consequences of Nazism would have caught up with women in her line of work; they had no safety net, and no one to speak up if the climate turned.
“It’ll all work itself out. It’s only politics. And what has that got to do with us?”
Ernst Ludwig
“I would like to see to it that Berlin opens its arms to you. We begin tonight!”
The friendly face of extremism hiding in plain sight is the epitome of Ernst Ludwig’s ethos. Ernst begins Act One as charming, friendly, and generous to Cliff by taking him on a night out, providing a place to stay, and giving him a source of income. Sally first hints at his ulterior motives, noting that Americans like Cliff are rarely questioned at the border, which makes them perfect for inadvertently doing Ernst’s bidding and smuggling money out of Paris. But at the turn of a dime, upon discovering Fräulein Schneider was to marry Herr Schultz, who is Jewish, Ernst strongly advised her against it, leveraging the fact that he’s the reason she has tenants at all.
It was shocking to suddenly see the red armband on my first watch, because I could see so much of his energy and charming side in people around me, and I realized I’ve also shied away from doing the things I want to do out of fear, fed to me by the Ernsts in my life.
“If you were German, you’d understand.”
Herr Schultz
“I know I’m right. I know the Germans. After all, what am I? A German!”
Herr Schultz is the person who believes decency will win out, because it has always won out for him. He’s a fruit seller, a proud German, and a Jewish man who has spent his whole life being welcomed by his neighbors. Why would that change now? Every warning sign gets filed under “a phase”: someone will see sense, someone will step in, the grown-ups will handle it. His optimism isn’t foolish so much as it is generous. He assumes everyone around him is as well-intentioned as he is, and that assumption is exactly what leaves him unprepared.
The brick scene is where the benefit of the doubt is shattered. After one is thrown through his window, he doesn’t call it a threat, but mere children, and then he turns to Fräulein Schneider and asks her to agree. That last “you understand?” isn’t informing; he’s begging to be told he’s right. In real life, I see this sentiment in many of my peers and family who seek positive change yet don’t take it upon themselves to vote. It’s not a crime to not vote; there are so many reasons one may not go, but so many times have I seen well-intentioned, kind people get screwed over by a change in the political tide because the belief in humanity’s good will wasn’t enough. People downplay what’s happening not because they can’t see it, but because the alternative is admitting their trust was misplaced.
“It’s nothing- just children on their way to school. Mischievous children, nothing more. I assure you…You understand?”
Fräulein Schneider
“Oh I understand, one will do what one must… The sun will rise, the moon will set, and you learn to settle for what you get”
Fräulein Schneider is the person who can’t afford to be brave. She’s a landlady in her sixties with a boarding house to keep and no safety net. When she’s offered the chance to marry Herr Schultz, she’s happy, and then she’s reminded exactly how much she stands to lose. Her tenants, her income, and her license all depend on staying in the good graces of the people like Ernst gaining power. So she does the math, and she chooses survival.
What makes her so painful to watch is that she isn’t fooled. She sees what’s coming, and she says so plainly; it’s just that she doesn’t believe she has the luxury of acting on it. It’s easy to judge her for it, Cliff certainly does, despite fleeing the mess himself. It’s harder to ask who gets to take a stand and who has to keep the lights on. Courage costs the most for the people with the least cushion, and that shows up today in people who can’t risk their job by speaking out, can’t take unpaid time off to vote, or can’t afford making “the wrong move” in the eyes of those in power.
“One can no longer dismiss them. They are my friends, my neighbors, how many others are there?”
Fräulein Kost
[Referring to a half-dressed man emerging from her bedroom] “Ah, my nephew from um… Hamburg!”
Kost is the person who didn’t start out believing in any of it. She’s a struggling tenant in Fräulein Schneider’s, with the hard job of selling her body in an even harder economy, taking whatever work and whatever safety she can find. When the wind shifts, she shifts with it. That’s what makes her unsettling; she isn’t forced to spew hatred; she readily volunteers. The night Ernst’s armband comes out, she’s the first one who accommodates for his approval. Belonging to the winning side feels better than being poor and overlooked, and a movement that tells you you’re part of something bigger is very good at selling that feeling to people who’ve been told they’re worth less. You can see the same pull today in grifters who’re offered belonging in exchange for turning on people like themselves. The cruel part is that ideologies like these never actually make room for people like her. They only need her enthusiasm, and they have no use for her afterward.
[Sings “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” when Ernst wants to leave a party hosted by Herr Schultz, who is Jewish.] “♪ Oh, fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see, the morning will come when the world is mine… tomorrow belongs to me. ♪”
Curtain Call
If I’m being honest, I’d like to be the one who speaks up, but more often than not, I’m a mix of Cliff and Fräulein Schneider: I notice everything, narrate it to anyone who’ll listen, but then wait for someone else to act. I weigh what speaking up would cost against what staying quiet keeps safe, wonder if I’m being “the friend that’s too woke,” I do the math paralyzed in complacency, and I tell myself that’s just being realistic. I don’t think that makes me a villain; I just think it’s being reasonable, but neither did Fräulein Schneider… and look where that led her. With time, I’ve gotten much more comfortable standing for what I believe in, but I can’t lie and say that it’s always an easy decision to make.
I think that’s why the Emcee works so well. He never forces anyone to stay, he just tells us to leave our troubles outside, that life is beautiful, and we’re so comfortable that leaving never feels urgent. Then Cabaret ends, the lights come up, and the question is no longer whether the people on stage should’ve done this or that; it’s what we do with the rest of the life we’ve got.
“Do you feel good? I bet you do! Bleibe! Reste! Stay!”