The turn for the worst begins in the last scene of act one when Fraulein Schneider, is enjoying her engagement party with her fiance, Herr Schultz, a Jewish man. Her long-time friend, Ernest Ludwig, joins the party and sheds his coat to dance. In doing so he reveals that he’s sporting a red arm band with a swastika on it. Ludwig’s reveal of being a Nazi and loud disapproval of the couple’s union causes awkward tension to grow at the party. Rather than getting pushback from the crowd though, the soon to be wedded couple along with their friends Sally and Cliff, look on in horror as all of the others hold hands and sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” symbolizing their conformity to the Nazi party.
The theatre program’s production of “Cabaret” played to audiences in the flex theater on Feb.13-14, 18-21. The flex theatre space created an immersive experience for the audience, enhancing the message of the show.
The story follows author Cliff Bradshaw’s trip to Berlin in the early 1930s during the Nazis rise to power. We meet Cliff, played by senior Nash Swinson, and the show opens on a lighter note, with comedic and raunchy dancing at the Kit Kat Klub, a bubbly Emcee, and the flirtatious dancer Sally Bowles, played by senior Elliana Farrow. With the upbeat songs and dramatic story line, the musical purposefully distracts you from its setting in Nazi Germany, just as the characters distract themselves with night clubs, affairs and drinking.
The act 1 finale, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” is the first real instance where themes of Nazism and conforming to the Nazi party start to weigh on the once light tone of the musical.
“I think that a lot of the specifically Nazi related imagery was a lot, but I don’t know if I would call it too much because I think that it’s important to not sugarcoat things,” junior Hayes McCracken, who played the Nazi Ludwig, said. “This is what was happening. I think that we need to recognize that in order to not let history repeat itself.”
Senior Chet Salsbury played the role of Emcee, a character that interacts with the main storyline while also watching over and commenting on what’s going on.
“He knows what’s coming and is seeing how the other characters deal with it and can’t really do anything about it,” Salsbury said. “It’s kind of a weird, omniscient yet disconnected role which makes it hard because you want to feel for the characters and you want to try and portray what’s going on outside of the club throughout the show without leaning one way or another too hard.”
Salsbury’s Emcee is the most openly aware of what’s happening around him, yet still stays bubbly and energetic up until the very end, making him an interesting character to portray.
“So I just tried to eat, drink, be merry the whole time and then obviously everything goes bad at the end,” Salsbury said. “It was a very big challenge, but one that I deeply enjoyed.”
With the heavy topics in the story, there were many challenges. Most of the characters conform to the rise of the Nazis, making for many uncomfortable moments in the show.
“I think that it’s important for other students to see their peers performing these topics,” junior Caroline Shaw, who played Fraulein Schneider, said. “And it’s important to understand these heavy topics in a way that has all of the student body as a part of them.”
The flamboyant Emcee’s few solo musical numbers encapsulated some of the societal issues of the time. In the song “If You Could See Her” Emcee talks about the ridicule he faces from society for having a “gorilla” for a lover — Salsbury performs with another actor dressed as a gorilla in a pink tutu. It’s a funny number for the most part, but it ends on a shocking and uncomfortable note that drives home the symbolism of being with a Jewish woman at the time.
“It’s this little cute song and dance number where I’m with a gorilla in a tutu,” Said Salsbury, “then at the end of the song I say ‘if you could see her’–referring to the gorilla–‘through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.’ So that’s another total gut punch of anti-Semitism and exposing how Nazism is kind of rising unchecked throughout the story.”
Unfortunately, not everyone in the audience treated that moment as appropriately as Salsbury would have liked.
“And one of the nights, there were a couple people who laughed at that last line,” Salsbury said. “That hadn’t happened any other night. Every other audience got it pretty much immediately. That there was an audience that laughed–that really put me off and made me a little angry, honestly.”
Putting on a show with such dark themes could feel uncomfortable for the actors, their parents, and the entire audience in general. But through that discomfort, the show spreads a powerful message, one that theater director Mark Swezey believed shouldn’t be shied away from or ignored.
“We try to approach the whole production with a big idea, a big concept, we call them,” Swezey said. “That is about how we picture ‘Cabaret’ being about the consequences of wearing blinders through life. That’s what enabled the Nazis to do what they did in Germany. Because people wrote them off. They said ‘it’s just another political movement. It’s nothing to worry about.’ Theater is also about holding a mirror up to the world so that we see the good things we do and the bad things we do in order to make the world a better place. We felt like the climate in this country today, maybe needed to see something like ‘Cabaret.’”
The actors had to find balance in their characters while performing both comedic and emotional musical moments. Some notable moments included the dancers at the Kit Kat Klub marching off of the stage doing the Nazi salute after performing a dance number, and Fraulein Schnider calling off her wedding because she was concerned about the implications of marrying a German and Jewish man. Having to put themselves in the shoes of these characters was a feat for the actors. For McCracken, the challenge of portraying his character Ludwig came with the extra baggage of being a Nazi.
“Playing that character, you can’t believe that you are a bad person,” McCracken said. “Germany was so destroyed and terrible and you have this party coming in that’s saying, ‘hey, we’re going to fix the economy and we’re going to make your life better.’ The people that were in support of this party at the time were not just like ‘I’m evil’, they were good people that were roped into the party–that obviously weren’t good after that–but they truly believed that they were joining a noble cause and that things would become better for them. So it was really interesting that I had to pretend like I was playing the good guy or believe that when, evidently, I was not.”
The harsh consequences of purposeful ignorance and distracting oneself from what’s truly important is not only woven into the story, but reflected back to the audience – literally. When audience members walked into the flex theatre on those February nights, they were met with a cramped room filled to the brim with strangers and friends alike, and mirrors facing them.
At the end of the musical, when the entire cast and audience beholds The Emcee’s execution in a concentration camp uniform, those mirrors are brought back yet again to put the audience in the cast’s shoes. Every hard decision made, blind eye turned, and misdeed done by the characters in conformity to the Nazi regime that the audience can judge them for, is reflected back on to said audience.
“The basic themes of oppression and ignorance and just living your life with blinders on is constantly relevant, even so today,” Salsbury said. “I feel like [‘Cabaret’] was a great choice because it can apply to so many people and so many people can see themselves in the show. That’s good to get as many people thinking about what they can do to help our society and how they can use their voice.”
Having high school students produce this musical, showing it to their peers and making them sit with the discomfort is imperative to the spreading and understanding of the message in a way that can strongly impact our society.
“If young people can teach about the dangers of complacency and letting oppression seep in through the crack under the door,” Salsbury said, “then that’s how we can combat it, and that’s how we can try and stop it, as a larger being than just ourselves.”
