Cabaret begins with the Kit Kat Klub’s flamboyant master of ceremonies enticing the audience to leave their worries outside: “Life is disappointing? Forget it!” It ends with the same character—an unforgettably haunting performance by Eddie Redmayne when I saw the show this past summer, though Adam Lambert took over the role in October—donning a boxy suit and attempting to blend into a world where drawing attention to yourself in certain ways is no longer safe.
That’s the real tragedy at the center of Cabaret, which debuted theatrically in 1966, became a hit film in 1972, and was revived in 2024 at Broadway’s August Wilson Theatre. Yes, the Nazis take power and the war comes and the audience knows that millions will die after the curtain falls—but all that takes place outside the frame of the story. Cabaret is about vulnerable people, powerless against the rise of a sweeping authoritarian regime, each seeking a way to cope with the unprecedented times in which they live.
As politics punctures their lives in various ways, they move, they mourn, they try to blend in, or they try to go on as if nothing has changed. If they survive what’s coming, it seems certain it will be as something less than their full selves. That’s the cost of enduring when freedom fades.
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