What good is sitting alone in your room…
Originally published at Walking on Christopher's Street. You can comment here or there.
A German night at the theater. Saturday my friend Joel and I went out to see Cabaret at the Ordway. We began the night with dinner at Glockenspiel, a very authentic German restaurant in St. Paul. It seemed fitting to have a good German dinner before seeing a show set in Germany.
Cabaret has to be one of my favorite musicals, not the favorite, but definitely in the top five. I think it is the combination of the historical setting in one of my favorite cites in the world, Berlin, and the upbeat Kander and Ebb score, or the powerful semi-autobiographical storyline inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, compiled from his time in the city during the rise of the Third Reich.
I have seen a few other performances as well as the movie adaptation, and I think this one at the Ordway is the best I have ever seen and really some of the best theater I have seen at that. The Ordway center did a phenomenal job in transporting this audience to 1929 Berlin when life was freer, sexual taboo’s non-existent and a city and a country were about to embark on the world changing time of confusion and tragedy known as WWII.
Unlike most productions I have seen, they truly brought forth the rise of the Nazi party during this time frame and how the German population was grasping at anything to come out from underneath the inflation and controls put on it after WWI. What disappointed me now about the other productions is how much they seemed afraid to address this important aspect of the show and of history. It truly tells the story much more cleanly when the dominance of the Nazi Party among the German population was. Having been to Berlin and read parts of Isherwood’s writings, it is shocking yet surprising understanding how the Nazi Party was able to come to such quick and terrifying power.
I guess the purpose of theater is to entertain but also I think it is to get people to think and consider. I think this production did just that by ending the Act with a number of Nazi/Hitler propaganda banners and when the audience returned from intermission, they were still there. Kind of a metaphor of today where we all like to believe the evils of Hitler and the genocide he caused in the Holocaust, similar actions are perpetrated today, by others, in different countries yes still today 60 years later.