Edit in 2024: Wow! The Eddie Redmayne effect has found me. I forgot this post existed, but I’m happy it’s getting attention now. I’ve become a much better writer over the last several years, so I gave this post a much-needed edit for grammar. Please note that this post was written before the 2024 Broadway revival, so some details may not align with the current production. Thanks for reading!

The musical Cabaret begins and ends the same way. The show opens with the Emcee greeting us and promising us that “we have no troubles here!” Along with our protagonist Cliff, the audience falls for the “mysterious and fascinating” Sally Bowles and the lurid, hedonist denizens of the Kit Kat Klub. We give into the enticing escapism that the Emcee promises. Then, in the finale of act one, a character takes off his jacket to reveal a Nazi armband, and our entire paradise is thrown into chaos. Along with Cliff, the audience watches helplessly as the Third Reich rises to power, much to the apathy of our thoughtless heroine and her self-absorbed friends. At the very end of the show, our old friend, the Emcee, returns to us once more. He mugs to the audience, and we think he’ll make us laugh— leave us on a high note with some silly quip— and then he removes his coat to reveal a striped uniform marked with a yellow Star of David and a pink triangle. “Where are your troubles now?” He asks us. “Forgotten? I told you so.”

The show’s titular song is very famous and very frequently sung out of context. Young girls at vocal recitals happily belt “life is a cabaret, old chum,” as if that’s really the takeaway of this musical— as if the song isn’tdelivered in the show by a post-abortion Nazi sympathizer who has fled the only meaningful relationship in her life because she was afraid to give up her lifestyle of debauchery.

The message of Cabaret is that life is most certainly not a cabaret, old chum.

Cabaret tells us to shove our escapist fantasies and be aware of our lives in three ways.

First, there’s the action of the plot— Cliff embraces escapism and happily ignores reality until he realizes he’s been unwittingly serving the Nazi party to support his life with Sally in Berlin. Sally seems like an ephemeral, carefree spirit, until Cliff is forced to come to terms with the fact that she’s really an irresponsible, clueless mess. Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz fantasize about marrying until Nazi party members who were once their friends remind them that Herr Schultz’ status as a Jew means their marriage would bring dire repercussions. Every character is forced to face an unhappy reality by the end, their fantasies cut short. The only character who stays in denial is Sally. By that point in the plot, she seems not only like a badperson, but a pitiable one, doomed by hubris to spend the rest of her life in a self-destructive daydream.

Second, there’s what happens in the audience. The Emcee in Cabaret is both the Emcee of the fictional Kit Kat Klub as well as the Emcee of the audience’s evening in the theater. From his very first entrance, we the audience are inserted into the show. He speaks directly to us so the line between house and stage becomes blurred. We’re invited into a dreamworld ourselves, the world of Cliff and Sally and the Klub, and we fall for the fanciful conceit of this world the same way Cliff does. We ignore the warning signs and allow ourselves to be taken in by sex and lace and sequins, until it’s too late to deny our bystandership. We haven’t been paying attention. The audience becomes an unwitting, but not entirely unwilling, accomplice to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Perhaps my favorite scene in the show falls just after the start of act two. A heavym emotional scene ends, and here comes the Emcee, prancing on stage with an apparently female gorilla in a tutu. The audience laughs and claps along as he sings a characteristically nonsensical song about love and acceptance and the gorilla dances a ballet. “Why can’t the world leben and leben lassen— live and let live?” He asks, and we laugh, because he’s describing a relationship with a monkey. We laugh right up to final line of the song: “If you could see her through my eyes… she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” Suddenly, no one is laughing.

The third way Cabaret functions as a cautionary device is a bit more subtle.

In his landmark book The Empty Space, theatrical legend Peter Brook categorizes different types of theatre by the effect they have their audiences. One of these is the Holy theatre, wherein the audience is moved to total self-forgetfulness by the magic onstage before them. Think Elphaba soaring into the sky on a high note and an orchestral flourish, think Elle Woods leading an entire parade of backup dancers and singers into a courtroom for a grand finale, think the Mother Abbess reducing an entire audience to tears with the final chords of Climb Every Mountain.

Then there is the Rough theatre, which is effectively the opposite of the Holy. The point of the Rough is not to make us forget ourselves— it is to make us self-aware, and uncomfortably so. It is a finger which points at us and says “you out there in the audience are not off this hook.” Cabaret is a perfect example of the Rough theatre— it lulls its audience into happy complacency, and then it criticizes them when the consequences of their complacency are made clear. And that scolding comes with a sting.

This is the third way Cabaret is tells us to kill off our escapist fantasies. Cabaret is not just a cautionary tale presented through theatre. It is a shock to the senses, a bucket of cold water thrown on the audience— it is timeless in that it points to anything happening in our lives which we are tempted to ignore and says “look at what you are missing.” It’s about reminding us to live the rest of our lives differently. Our night at the theatre alienates us, makes us uncomfortable and self-aware, and so we return to our regular lives with open eyes and a sense of unease about where else we may be an unwitting, complacent accomplice.

“We have no troubles here,” indeed.

Cabaret tells us sardonically that if we claim to have no troubles, we are probably clueless, or else simply in denial. It spares the audience no discomfort in letting them know that they’ve all been had— and that they sorely need to wise up in the future.

I love Cabaret for this message. It’s one of my favorite musicals. With all the hallmark trappings of an iconic theatrical production, it’s full of pretty women, song-and-dance numbers, sex, flirtation, laughs — and yet, it is a profoundly emotionally effective piece, made all the more powerful by leaning into the things that make it uncomfortable.

I’m thinking about Cabaret right now (more than I usually do, anyway) because of this news story. LaGuardia High School was forced to remove all of the Nazi imagery from their production of The Sound of Music after the principal deemed it too offensive.

Well, of course Nazi imagery is offensive. That’s the point.

As Cabaret illustrates, the offensive and uncomfortable are powerful. Cabaret is intentionally shocking. It contains generous fornication, drugs, Nazis, violence. But the inclusion of these elements is not an act of worship. Cabaret is not the raunchy free-for-all it wants you to think it is. These elements are traps in order play the audience as the fool. Sex is seemingly glorified, until we realize it’s just the fancy gimmick used to lure us in— and the second act, one we’ve seen the truth, is decidedly sexless. We are tempted to ignore Sally’s drug use and implied alcoholism because she is so “mysterious and fascinating,” but are forced to come to terms with the fact that she’s not at all the lovable diva we thought we saw in act one. By the end, the offensive content is just that— offensive. We’ve seen it for what it is, and that’s why it’s in the show.

Cabaret illustrates that ignoring our problems is not a solution.

The Holocaust is a part of our history. The Sound of Music is based on the memoirs of the real-life Von Trapp family, who really did flee Austria when the Nazi party rose to power. And, like it or not, it seems we can’t go more than a few days recently without comparisons of either American political party to the Nazi party. We can’t pretend there were or are “no troubles here.”

Censorship in high school theatre is a widespread issue. Stories go viral regularly about principals discovering, two weeks before opening night of their school’s production, that they probably should have actually read the script they approved. Most often, censorship of this sort comes back to this idea: pretending that problems don’t exist. Instead of discussing suicide, domestic violence, substance abuse and dependency— real problems students today face— theatre departments are gagged. Discussing these is a liability when we could simply be quiet. Nazi flags are too offensive to be seen on stage, never mind what we may think of them when we see them carried in marches on the street.

High school administrators are engaging in a strange sort of escapist fantasy themselves, in which everyone else is aware of the problems, but they plug their ears so as to avoid addressing them. Never before would I have thought to compare high school admins to Sally Bowles, and yet, here we are.

When serious problems are addressed in a theatre space, it allows a dialogue to begin that benefits actors and audience alike. Cabaret does this brilliantly. These benefits can be multiplied in school theatre, where students’ learning is guided by educators. The school auditorium becomes a place not just for lighthearted family fun, but for real, meaningful learning— and in a school, no less!

Cabaret admonishes us to look for the problems in our own world and make them our business. Cabaret tells us that life isn’t carefree, and trying to pretend it is only brings unhappiness. Cabaret reminds us that escaping from the real world might mean forgetting your troubles temporarily… but in the end, they’ll still be there.

If we let ourselves get wrapped up in laughing at the man dancing with the gorilla for long enough, we’ll discover we’ve missed something important— and if we let that happen, no one will be laughing at all.