Proudly, provocatively and authoritatively he enters the scene – sporting an armband with a loud red Swastika. We’re well into our love stories when suddenly the seemingly friendly, sly man named Ernst sweeps again onto the stage. This is the time of Hitler’s entrance onto the world stage.Īt first, we don’t see it coming. They each struggle with love and with their histories of disappointment. To a German spinster and a widowed German Jew. We’re introduced to cabaret dancers and lonely people coming together: to an American writer and the beautiful Kit Kat Club’s performer Sally Bowles. He announces and pronounces each and every thing that will and does occur in Cabaret: He’s invincible at times and he’s broken in the end, shattered by the forces of hate within him and in the world. A starkly intense, vulnerable, often manic, fractured demonstration of all the conflicting forces struggling for dominance in every human mind. Having successfully seduced us into a show that isn’t, in its bones, the loose bodacious erotic fun it appears to be on the surface, he will show us what and who he is. His apparent welcome isn’t to be trusted. Leaning towards the audience, he points that finger at us, in a strangely foreboding way: “Let the show begin!” He turns with a flourish, flitting off the stage Puckish-like, leaving us, but only for the moment. “Ladies and Gentleman! Welcome to our show.” His voice, harshly sinister, is not welcoming.īrandishing a sharp, shiny, and detachable finger that comes on and off throughout the show, The Emcee puts it on now and every time he has something he must say. The Emcee jumps out onto the stage, leaping up on a ledge as close to the audience as he can get. Male dancers join them with lewd bodily touches, stroking forming twosomes and threesomes. SeductionsĮntering the theater, scantily dressed women dancers are moving sensually on stage in suggestive poses. But, it’s just as important to understand the internal barriers that make it impossible to freely love someone that you actually do love. We see, in the 1930’s form of Hitler and the Nazis, the external forces working to undermine freedom.
A frightening time especially in the ways that Hitler’s seductive promises veiled a thirst for power that would murder, provoke fear destroy lives and hope.
If you’ve seen Cabaret, you know the play takes place in 1930’s Berlin, at the time Hitler was vying for power. Director Michael Matthews’ version of this well-known and loved musical crosses all conceivable boundaries anything goes.
Over Labor Day weekend, I saw a remarkable performance of Cabaret at the Celebration Theater at The Lex in Hollywood.
#The emcee cabaret plus#
Cabaret is a powerful and disturbing illustration, plus a startling reminder, of the various ways these dangers lurk. We have to watch out for those complicated forces, in the outside world and living inside us, that want to deceive us if we aren’t aware. It’s frightening how quickly freedom disappears.
0 kommentar(er)
