Life In Today’s MAGA World Is Rarely A Cabaret, Old Chum
Life In Today’s MAGA World Is Rarely A Cabaret, Old Chum
Revisiting a classic.
Cabaretis one of my favorite musicals (and films), so I was thrilled to attend an engaging new production Saturday night in Portland, Oregon. Perhaps the show's greatest triumph and our enduring tragedy is how it remains so timeless.
Watching Cabaret in 2023, though, I couldn't help feeling the limits of satire against an emerging evil. The Kit Kat Klub's emcee and Cabaret dancers openly mock Hitler and the Nazis like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch (well, a good one, at least). All that goose-stepping seems obviously absurd and comical, but the Nazis were already beginning a march across Europe that would leave bloody footprints in their wake. I admit I often wonder if ridiculing Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's Jewish space lasersand "gazpacho police" minimizes the very real threat she poses.
The musical's most chilling number is "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." Written by John Kander and Fred Ebb in the style of a traditional German song, its superficial patriotism hides a horrific intent. This isn't a mere anthem. It's a declaration of war. The song is performed as a duet between Ernst Ludwig, a Nazi, and Fräulein Kost, a working girl who shares his fascist sympathies. The Portland production's Richard Cohn-Lee and Courtney Fero do a great job making us like their characters before we realize who they've always been.
Kost resents the "elite" who she believes looks down on her, and this includes her boarding house neighbor, Herr Schultz, who's Jewish. Kost tells Ludwig that Schultz could easily afford a party far grander than the one he's throwing for his short-lived engagement because the Jews "have all the money." Schultz is a humble fruit vendor, hardly a titan of industry, but facts could never withstand Nazi feelings.
Weimar-era Germany was marked by high inflation and crushing poverty. People were literally starving to death on Berlin streets. Nazis didn't have actual solutions to these problems, but they knew who to blame. That's a familiar fascist tactic. Critics of the 1972 Bob Fosse film of Cabaret, which I nonetheless adore, argue that Fosse ignored these grim economic conditions and overly glamorized the period. In most stage productions, Fräulein Kost represents the confluence of genuine "economic anxiety" with seething cultural resentment. Her immediate bond with the more "respectable" Ludwig is a prescient reflection of the MAGA movement.
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The audience at Saturday's performance gasped when Ludwig removes his coat at the party and reveals a Nazi armband on his sleeve. Cabaret cleverly builds to this reveal. Ludwig is seemingly pleasant and generous, and he tells his visibly appalled friend Cliff, "Enough politics! What does it matter? We are friends." That seem especially relevant now, when diehard MAGA supporters whine that "intolerant" liberals don't want to socialize with them, and every year, it seems there's a new op-ed about how (usually white) liberals should chill out and enjoy the holidays with their MAGA relatives. These articles boil down to "Enough politics! What does [January 6/COVID-19 vaccines/election denial] matter? We are family!"
Cliff could probably maintain a friendship with Ludwig, though his queerness would eventually become a problem, but he wisely avoids the personal tragedy described so movingly in Martin Niemöller's First They Came ... confessional. Ludwig and Kost are both snakes who successfully conceal their scales, at least for a while, which is where they differ from most MAGA supporters. It's much harder to produce the same end-of-act gut punch if your established characters put on a MAGA hat or reveal a "Let's Go Brandon" T-shirt. The odds are pretty good that they've already demonstrated that they're total assholes. Today, Cliff would've long since blocked Ludwig and Kost on social media.
It's also downright scary when Herr Schultz dismisses Nazism as a "phase." He can't imagine he'd ever become something less than a German, and his faith in his fellow citizens proves his undoing. The irrepressible Sally Bowles considers herself above petty politics, as well. It's all an ugly business that has nothing to do with her. We might dismiss their positions as naive or shallow, but I've personally witnessed otherwise decent people "check out" from politics, perhaps hoping that the current madness will all blow over. Unfortunately, that's a good way to end up dancing in the cabaret with Sally Bowles "at the end of the world" while remaining "fast asleep."
If you're in the Portland area, check out Stumptown Stages's Cabaret, which plays at the Winningstad Theatre through February 12. For now, here's that brilliant scene from the Cabaret revival with Alan Cumming.
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