Wake up, Sally, the party’s over “W

hat I am intrigued with is a whole new emphasis on the social issues that make Cabaret a show that reminds us that horrible things do happen and continue to happen to innocent people,” Judy Russell wrote in her director notes in the Cabaret program. “Art always has the ability to trigger our memory. Not just of personal experiences but of historical events that should not be forgotten.”

What she says gently in the program, she says with a hammer over the next two-anda-half hours on the Playhouse stage during this production of Cabarent, which runs through Saturday.

The talent on the stage is incredible, of course, delivering a spicy set of song-anddance numbers and naughty jokes from the Kit Kat Club in Berlin in the early 1930s. If that’s all an audience member takes away, they’ll be thoroughly satisfied.

Cabaret’s subversiveness is not how risqué the script, the song lyrics and the dance numbers are but how seamlessly it weaves in the blatant political statements.

As it was when Cabaret first debuted on Broadway in 1966 and again when the movie came out in 1972, Cabaret is new again in 2018, a dreamy parable about what happens when people, for a variety of reasons, fail to stand up for what’s true and right and decent.

Russell, like all directors, chooses her projects for the artistic challenge but also for political reasons. Last year, for Canada’s 150th anniversary, she went with Anne of Green Gables. If that show was a unabashed patriotic celebration, Cabaret is also patriotic but in the form of a flashing red light warning, a wake up call to the evil forces running through society.

The Emcee of the Kit Kat Club is a charismatic lecherous scoundrel, who is no deeper than his base instincts and believes every else is the same way, who resents it when the spotlight is not on him, who is cruel, selfish and manipulative, who feels sorry for himself when he is not being adored, who says and does things solely for applause and who is blatantly racist.

Sound like a certain someone we all know?

To be seduced by the Emcee, as everyone is in the beginning, is no crime but to not recognize his malevolence by the end is to stay asleep, to avoid the responsibility of challenging men like him, to demand more entertainment and laughs when what’s happening isn’t funny any more. In Russell’s version, the Emcee pays in the end for the forces he has unleashed but so does everyone else caught in his spell.

And everyone does pay in Cabaret. Whether their love of the spotlight blinds them to the threat, whether they see the danger and either run away or surrender without a fight, whether they think the politics matter or not, whether they wake up or not, they all pay.

After the surreal dreaminess of the first act, Cabaret descends into a horrific nightmare in the second.

When Cliff sings Why Should I Wake Up? and Fraulein Schneider sings What Would You Do? they are not only questioning themselves, they are asking the audience, too.

“Wake up, Sally, the party’s over,” Cliff demands but his solution for her isn’t freedom but further imprisonment in a future of his making, not hers.

He comes to regret his physical and emotional abuse of her, how his dehumanization of her for his own pleasure was, in the end, not much different from that of the condescending Emcee, but that wisdom arrives too late.

Staging Cabaret in 2018 is a rebellious but hopeful response to a darkening time, a plea that the audience wakes up long before Cliff does and puts a stop to this tragic comedy before more people get hurt.

“Enjoy the fantastic performances of this oh so talented cast and muse on the important social messages delivered in this script,” Russell instructs her audience in the program. “I hope you emerge from the theatre not only thoughtful but inspired and of course entertained.”

But not too entertained.

If putting on Cabaret is a political act by a director and her cast, the audience waking up to the Emcee in its midst and the damage he is doing to civil society also requires political action.

That is Cabaret’s challenge, as urgent now as it was 50 years ago.