If you are looking for adventure, go out and see Spotlighters Theatre’s current performance of Cabaret, a play that will transport you to a world of music-based euphoria.
Based on Christopher Isherwoood’s 1930 book Goodbye to Berlin and originally performed on Broadway in 1966, Cabaret is about love, illusions and music set against the background of pre-WWII Germany.
Cliff Bradshaw (Aaron Dalton), a young and idealistic American, goes to Berlin in an attempt to find the inspiration to write a novel. However as soon as he arrives, Cliff gets caught up in the merry-go-round of the city, temporarily losing track of what he originally came to find.
Hanging out at parties and in nightclubs, the young American finally gets love-inspired by the beautiful and talented cabaret-singer Sally Bowles (Lynne McCormick).
But beneath the subversive glimmer of cabaret culture, the political situation in Germany is deteriorating, and the rise of Nazism eventually replaces the parties and cabarets with insidious violence, causing irrecoverable damage in the character’s life, forcing Cliff and several other characters to make difficult choices about where their alliances lie.
The show portrays the decadent atmosphere in the 1930’s Berlin quite well, from the orgiastic parties where the champagne and the girls are endless, to the crooked businessmen searching for innocent victims.
The show’s saucy tone is set by the Emcee (Tim Eliott), an eccentric icon who serves as a tour guide for musical numbers. He delivers an amazing performance, balancing between irony and flamboyance.
The women of the Kit Kat Klub, the featured cabaret act, were entertaining with their strong dance skills and great costumes. They play their nasty show with a sense of humor and charm. The explosive love affair between Cliff and Sally explores issues like homosexuality, seduction and commitment, but the most touching relationship in this production is between two middle-aged characters: Cliff’s landlord Fraulein Schneider (Suzanne Young), a terse and lonely woman, and Herr Schultz (Jim Hart), a charming and generous Jewish gentleman. The couple brought real emotion to their songs, most endearingly through their duet “Married.”
Cabaret is a show that both entertains and educates. In the intimacy of the small Spotlighters Theatre, which makes for a pretty good Berlin cabaret spot, we see a closer look at the resignation and ambivalence that many had towards the world’s tense political situation in the early ‘30s.
Similarly, the portrayal of the conservative lifestyle of the Weimar republic undermined by raucous cabarets and decadent parties was interesting, but more generally, Cabaret offers a panel of human relationships and human behavior at one of the most important episodes in recent history.
