Life Is Not A Cabaret, Old Chum

My wife, an enormously talented human being, performed in the local theater production of Cabaret last weekend. Of course, I went to see the show, despite the fact that it is a tough-edged piece of Kander-Ebb genius, a dark, hard show to watch, all the more so because it echoes the times we live in.

If you're only familiar with the movie version, well, that's a much gentler take on the stage show. In particular, it removes an entire subplot that makes the show's point far less subtle.

On stage, Sally Bowles is still there, wild and free and oblivious, somehow falling in with Cliff, also oblivious, but getting less so as the show progresses. He's American and she's British. When he arrives in Berlin at the show's opening, he's befriended by a pleasant German fellow, Ernst, who hooks Cliff up with an apartment in the building run by Fraulein Schneider. Missing from the film is the Fraulein's December-December romance with Herr Schulz, a businessman and a Jew. Their stories are interspersed with numbers in the Kit Kat Club, hosted by the Master of Ceremonies, who insures us that inside the club, everything is beautiful. 

Denial is a major theme of the work. Schneider deals with her prostitute boarder by just pretending that's not what's going on. Schulz insists that politics don't matter; it will all blow over. Cliff is smuggling contraband for Ernst, raising money for a good cause, and he doesn't ask what. The club is the heart of an endless wild party that ignores the outside world. And the audience is swept along--what fun songs! What delightful dancing!

But at the end of Act I, at Schneider and Schiltz's engagement party, Ernst stops by, takes off his overcoat, and we see that the good cause of this affable, friendly man is the Nazi party. He is happy to find his old friend about to be married late in her life--until he learns that Schultz is a Jew. "You must not marry him. It is for your own safety," he tells Schneider. And then the crowd signs "Tomorrow belongs to me," now clearly a Nazi anthem. End Act I.

Act II is brief and brutal. The engagement is broken, and while Cliff and Sally offer Fraulein Schneider cheery bromides about togetherness and standing up for what you believe, she asks them (and the audience) what would you do? Cliff, rocked by all of this, wants to take the now-pregnant Sally to America, but instead she retreats to the club. Introduced one last time by a Master of Ceremonies who is no longer saucy and confident, but is now hollowed out and resigned, introduces her one last time.

This is where the song "Cabaret" comes in, a song that is familiar as a happy upbeat piece--but only when taken wildly out of context. In context--well, this was the part in the show where I was almost brought to tears. It is an anthem to denial in the worst of times. "No use permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away" sounds great, unless the prophet is correct. And the verse, about her old friend Elsie, outlines her aspiration to be a happy, young corpse who dies while the party is still going on. And then, after the last note, she collapses on stage.

It's downhill all the way. Sally gets an abortion. Schultz moves out to make things easier for Schneider. He's still confident that he will be fine because this will all boil over and her is, after all, a German himself; we know that he's wrong. Cliff leaves for America, alone and with a story about the end of the world and Sally Bowles (that is, of course, the novel on which the theater piece is based). The Master of Ceremonies ushers the characters into the mists of oblivion, the stage goes dark, and here, at the end of the show, nobody applauds.

Cabaret is a subversive work. It's about people who party and play and entertain themselves into denial while doom and destruction gather around them, and as we in the audience figure that out, we can say "These foolish people. Who just plays in the face of obvious evil," but then we have to confront our own hands, applauding the characters for those actions. And it becomes increasingly more difficult. There's a fun number with a dancing kick line that turns into a goose step. The Master of Ceremonies shares a cute song and dance with a gorilla that ends with an ugly gut punch of anti-semitism. Do we applaud, or not? 

When the show was developed in the mid-sixties, Producer Harold Prince was aiming for a show that would provide gritty moral dilemmas that evoked the moral struggles of the time. 

The song "Cabaret" joins the small group of misconstrued songs in musicals (see also "One" from Chorus Line and the finale to Kander and Ebb's other genius show, Chicago), songs that in context are about exactly the opposite idea that casual listeners ascribe to them. The real central song of the show, for my money (and not just because my wife sang the hell out of it every time) is Fraulein Schneider's "What Would You Do?"

With time rushing by,
What would you do?

With the clock running down,
What would you do?
The young always have the cure-
Being brave, being sure
And free,
But imagine if you were me.
Alone like me,
And this is the only world you know.
Some rooms to let?
The sum of a lifetime, even so.

I'll take your advice.
What would you do?

Would you pay the price?
What would you do?

Suppose simply keeping still
Means you manage until the end?
What would you do,
My brave young friend?

Grown old like me,
With neither the will nor wish to run;
Grown tired like me,
Who hurries for bed when day is done;
Grown wise like me,
Who isn't at war with anyone?
Not anyone!

With a storm in the wind,
What would you do?

Suppose you're one frightened voice
Being told what the choice must be.

Go on; tell me,
I will listen.
What would you do?
If you were me?

But Fraulein Schneider is not the hero of the story, either. What does one do, when evil comes in affable, friendly, familiar form, and your biggest impulse is to dance or hunker down, to try to hide from the storm and hope, somehow, that you are or those you love are not swept away in it. To try to party and sing loudly enough that you can ignore the other voices. To stay at the cabaret and leave the world outside to its own end, as if, somehow, that would not be your end as well.

We live through a many times and tides, and it sucks that right now the tides in education are dark and ugly, and it would be nice if we could all go hang out at some club somewhere and waited for the tide to shift. But there is one other notable feature of Cabaret the show-- everyone in it is on their own, with no ties, no other people depending on them. In fact the events show them unable to form those bonds even when they want to. But people who work in service fields--teachers, health care workers, etc--have those responsibilities, those ties, and so there is no retreating to the club without abandoning those who depend on us. Which doesn't mean we're called on to be superhuman, but we can't just check out, either. 

Nor should the club be shut down forever. There is always light in our lives, sometimes more than others. But there is a huge difference between celebrating life and hiding from it because it's ugly, because it demands something hard from us. There is a big difference between celebrating what is bright and good and pretending that the brightness is all there is, ignoring the darkness and letting it fester or grow. 

It's something to see a show like this brought to life by friends and family; it's a show that could easily be performed as so much less than what it is. Theater is supposed to hold the mirror up to nature, and sometimes in the mirror we see our best selves and sometimes we can see that we've got spinach in our teeth and schmutz on our foreheads, and both are ways to help us find our better natures. 

Some lessons framed in history are hard and uncomfortable and unpleasant, but there is no way to find our better selves without them. And sometimes the cabaret isn't a party or dancing or debauchery, but a happy fairy tale about a past that never was, a past in which we can hide (and encourage the next generation to also hide) from uncomfortable truths about our failures, even as we fail to confront those failures by hiding in the cabaret instead and insisting that our country has always been a bright, delightful party.

That's not the way forward. That's not the way up. Life is not a cabaret.