Timeless quality of Cabaret shines through on stage
Life is a cabaret, old chum. Welcome to Cabaret. The song refrain is not just a catchy bit of Broadway sizzle. It is a reminder that this whimsical spritz of fiction is indeed all about the here and now. The unseen cast member of Judy Russell’s production of Cabaret is an actor named Current Events.
We are in different times now than when Cabaret debuted in the 1960s. That was made especially clear at the P.G. Playhouse on Sunday night when one of the songs – a lilting tune akin to Hitler Youth anthems – was playing on a crackling gramaphone record until the creepy Emcee character jumped in to utter the last two words.
“The sun on the meadow is summery warm, the stag in the forest runs free, but gather together to greet the storm, the future belongs to me.”
A cluster of younger viewers at the front of the hall laughed out loud, an LOL as the kids say these days while the older audience members sat in stoney silence.
Cabaret is a dark comedy, yes, but that moment was. Not. Funny.
Tomorrow Belongs To Me was composed for the play (by ironically gay Jewish songwriter John Kander) to hint at the cheery propaganda sinister dictatorships use to brainwash even their smallest disciples. Survivors of the Second World War know of that tactic well, but these modern youth couldn’t recognize a Nazi dog whistle when they heard one.
Maybe they were caught up in the atmosphere of the fictional hotspot the Kit Kat Klub, watching the scantily clad dancing girls (every inch of skin and swivel of hips entirely necessary to this vitally important story) and listening to the hot band (and it was an all-live, all-local sensational orchestra led by Greg Prosser).
You’ve got the sensational stage star Sally Bowles right in front of you in wet, wild 1930s Berlin.
You’ve got the engaging Emcee directing the evening’s action.
Mazal tov everyone!
We couldn’t go to that special place, were it not for the lead actors.
We relate best to the quasi-narrator, an affable American tourist named Cliff. He was played by Franco Celli, who has a few past credits to his name but this is his most substantial part to date and based on the results he deserves even more stage time.
He and Tristan Ghostkeeper, one of the city’s most acclaimed ballet dancers, broke some interesting ground in this production. They locked lips for perhaps the first prolonged same-sex kiss in P.G. mainstream theatre history.
Longtime local theatre goers have long assumed that Shelby Meaney was more than the sweet characters she’s had in the past and finally we get to see her power through a dark, complex part.
Here she is, in full-spectrum theatrical force. She sings like a gale, dances like a kite, and has the vulnerability and internal presence to bring all the conundrums of Sally Bowles to life. We have to believe every man falls for her, as Cliff does, but we also have to understand that she loves him, too.
The Emcee is there to show us the party animal that lives inside us all, but also the catty bully and cunning coward. The question after Sunday was, has there ever been an Emcee actor as effective as Owen Selkirk? A ballet dancer by trade, this is his coming out as a dramatist, and what a revelation it is. He is the toast of the city for this performance; the water-cooler buzz is all about him. He knows exactly when to purr and when to growl, when to pour and when to sip. The play descends from tipsy soiree into drunken brawl on his coattails.
Adam Harasimiuk as Ernst, the friend with a secret, was positively chilling in his ability to present a basket of political hatred like it was bread and wine. Think of Christof Waltz in Inglorious Basterds or David Thewlis in The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas for comparison.
It was a cast with no weak muscles. Not every moment of acting was stellar. Sometimes the accents wavered. Sometime the delivery was thin. This is community theatre, after all.
Since it is for the community and by the community, director Judy Russell chose Cabaret with deliberation. After a spate of Mary Poppins, Anne Of Green Gables, Sound Of Music and the like, this is a departure, especially since she’s done Cabaret twice in the past (2000 and 2001). This allowed her to make improvements on her past work, and also deliver the critical message inside this beautiful bottle.
You can’t help but sing yourself the songs at work the next day, but you also can’t shake the imprint of how our xenophobic present is mimicking the mad past.
It’s too tempting to pin all this modern trouble on Donald Trump, dismissively comparing him to Hitler. Other names could also be juxtaposed from the altright of now and the Nazis of then – Steve Bannon-Joseph Goebbels, Richard SpencerArtur Axmann, Andrew Anglin-Franz Six – but it wouldn’t include the real perpetrators. That would be you and me. The gladiator is to blame for the blood, but the roaring crowd is to blame for the violence.
Cabaret begs you to react early to the signs, lest they build momentum.
The indicative terms aren’t “Jew” or “master race” anymore. The veiled words now are ones like “nationalism” and “freedom of speech” and “sheeple” and “politically correct” and “ethnic pride” which all sound appealing to the casual listener but they are some of the buzzwords of groups wishing to sucker-punch multiculturalism, gender equality, secular religious freedom, etc. out of our culture. They tend to use simple examples to explain away complex concepts, or demonize institutions that verify science and allow for broad discourse.
Cabaret shows us how others were once in our position. Berliners lived and let live. But they held the door open to extremists who wouldn’t get out when the party went sour. The whole house got destroyed.
It sounds like a horror story, but it was all real and all recent. It happened because human nature contains all of head-in-the-sand Sally and duplicitous Emcee and dogmatic Ernst and rational Cliff. We all are capable of love and murder.
Therefore when your friends talk about how humans are not to blame for climate change, or everyone should own militarygrade guns, or that the Muslim religion is antithetical to Western culture, or the Mexican border needs a wall, or transgendered people should have to go to a different washroom, or Aboriginal people lost the war, or the Confederate flag was just a symbol of rebellious freedom, or her short skirt was an invitation to grab her ass – none of which stands up to the rigors of dispassionate scrutiny – you definitely want to oppose that somehow.
Don’t dance around them, go for a drink or two, and pretend it’s just nuisance politics. That it’ll all blow over.
Cabaret is on now at the P.G. Playhouse but only for a limited time. Tickets are online at the Central Interior Tickets website or at the door while supplies last.