Randy Harrison as the Emcee and the 2016 national touring cast of Roundabout Theatre Company’s ‘Cabaret.’ Photo by Joan Marcus.

By Sheryl Flatow
For the DCPA NewsCenter

The audible gasp followed by the deafening silence that often greets the final shattering moment of the national tour of Cabaret is a testament to the force of the invigorating Roundabout Theatre Company’s new touring production.

Written by John Kander (music), Fred Ebb (lyrics), and Joe Masteroff (book), Cabaret has long been recognized as one of the best and most important musicals of the 20th  century. But if the original production was groundbreaking, Roundabout’s version, directed by Sam Mendes and choreographed and co-directed by Rob Marshall, is seismic.   

Regardless of how well you think you know Cabaret, nothing quite prepares you for this decadent, riveting, devastating production, which Todd Haimes, Roundabout’s artistic director, calls a “reinvention” of the classic musical.       

First presented by Roundabout in 1998, the Mendes-Marshall staging won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical, ran for 2,377 performances and made a star of its Emcee, Alan Cumming, much as the original Hal Prince production made a star of Joel Grey. And the show’s directors caught the attention of Hollywood. Mendes would go on to win  the 2000 Oscar for Best Director for his first film, the Academy Award-winning American Beauty, and Marshall was nominated as Best Director in 2003 for his first film, the Academy Award-winning Chicago.

In 2014, a decade after Cabaret’s final “à bientôt,” Roundabout brought the production back to Broadway and then sent it on the road as part of the company’s 50^th anniversary celebration. “This production changed musical theater,” says Haimes. “It gave us actors doubling as the orchestra and an environmental musical. I brought the show back because I thought a new generation should see the work that Sam and Rob did, which is truly seminal.”

Willkommen to Berlin, 1929, and to the  Kit Kat Klub, a cabaret that serves as a reflection of the Weimar Republic as it plunges toward Nazism. The downward spiral is mirrored in the show’s two doomed love stories. The first is between Sally Bowles, a British singer with limited talent who performs at the club, and Clifford Bradshaw, a bisexual American writer. The other romance is between Fräulein Schneider, who runs a boardinghouse, and Herr Schultz, a German-Jewish shopkeeper.

“I first knew Cabaret from the movie, and I was astonished to discover the stage  show is quite different,” says Mendes. “It was a much more complex piece of work than the movie, and it had many more songs. In fact, it has one of the greatest scores in the history of musical theater, with songs such as ‘Cabaret,’ ‘If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,’ and ‘Willkommen.’ However, a score with nothing to say is only half a musical. What Hal Prince did was to create a great piece about the rise of Nazism and the rise of any kind of repressive regime. Cabaret is a great piece of theater because it says something about racism, about the intersection of politics and private life – how it’s impossible for Sally Bowles to live the way she attempts to live in that political environment. It refutes the people who think like she does, who say about politics, ‘What does that have to do with us?’ The truth is, it has everything to do with us.”

Mendes initially directed the show in 1993 at the 250-seat Donmar Warehouse in London, which he turned into a nightclub. He chose to have the ensemble double as musicians, unsure at the outset how that concept would work.

“Making the ensemble the musicians helped the notion that it was the nightclub putting on the show,” he says. “Everything is done contained within the framework of the Kit Kat Klub. It’s not just that the actors sing and dance and act and play instruments.  They also move the furniture and watch the show. It’s suffused with a kind of home-made energy that comes directly from a multi-talented cast, which you can only get in the theater. It’s not spectacle in the traditional sense, but I think it proves how little spectacle you need to put on a great show.”   

Like the characters in the show, the audience has so much fun for most of the first act that their eyes are closed to the tawdriness and unseemliness in front of them. That is due to the aforementioned great score – which includes three songs that were written for the film: “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time” and “Money” – the inspired staging, and the Emcee, who, Mendes says, “governs the entire show and dictates the rhythm of the evening.” The character has been completely revamped, vamp being the operative word. He invites members of the audience to come onstage and dance with him. He’s a pansexual seducer; insidiously charming, sexy, raunchy, impudent, flirty, mischievous and unsettling. He’s onstage for most of the show; when he’s not in a scene, he’s often lurking in the shadows.  

And the shadows truly begin to descend at the end of the first act, with the disturbing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The numbers in the second act acknowledge the bigotry, the demagoguery, and the ignorance that are permeating Germany. “If You Could See Her” is sung by the Emcee to a performer wearing a gorilla suit, and contains the chilling last line, “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” There is also the haunting “I Don’t Care Much,” which was unused in the original production but added to a 1987 Broadway revival and sung by the Emcee. It’s the only number that gives the audience a glimpse of the person behind the façade, who is aware that the roof is caving in. And when that collapse occurs, it stuns the audience.

Photos from the new national touring production of ‘Cabaret.’ To see more, click on the image above. Photos by Joan Marcus.

“Even this time around, when many people in the audience were already familiar with the production, it was like they were in shock after the final moment,” says Haimes. 

Cabaret is based on Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories and the play it inspired, I Am a Camera by John Van Druten. Prince wrote in a memoir that what attracted him and his colleagues to the material was “the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s.”  On the first day of rehearsals, Prince showed the cast a photo of a group of angry, young, Aryan-looking men, “snarling at the camera like a pack of hounds.” He asked the actors where and when the photo was taken. Although the image appeared to be a snapshot in time from 1928 Germany, it was, in fact, a picture of students in Chicago protesting school integration that appeared in Life magazine in 1966.

The theme of the show is as timely and urgent now as it was 50 years ago, and probably will be 50 years from now. “The world today is such a mess,” says Masteroff. “And when you understand what one man did to a sophisticated, intelligent country like Germany, then you wonder what could happen anywhere. It’s really kind of a warning.”

Cabaret: Ticket information

Come hear some of the most memorable songs in theatre history, including “Cabaret,” “Willkommen” and “Maybe This Time.” Leave your troubles outside — life is beautiful at Cabaret.
• Sept. 27-Oct. 9
• Buell Theatre
• Tickets: 303-893-4100 or Tickets: 303-893-4100 or BUY ONLINE
• Groups: Call 303-446-4829