It may seem strange to praise a show for making me say “I hate Humanity” at the end, yet this is exactly the case for the TCDS’s 2016 production of Cabaret. Cabaret was originally a musical based on Jon Van Druten’s 1951 play I am a Camera, and was later adapted as a film in 1972. It is the latter film that inspired director Ola Okarmus to put on a production of Cabaret at UofT. Set in Berlin in the 1930s, Cabaret looks at ordinary people trapped in a world that is corroding around them, revealing the human tendency to remain blind to injustice until it is too late.
To tackle such a dense, emotional, and ethically charged production, a truly stellar cast is necessary, and Cabaret delivers. Shak Haq, as the Emcee, is utterly convincing as a risqué and deliberately provocative narrator. Joining him at the “Kit Kat Klub” are the talented ensemble cast, who play the performers with appropriate relish, going so far as to create a system of friendships and antagonisms that they stick to when required to be in the background. In the much more modest world outside the Klub, Jocelyn Kraynyk gives her character Fraulein Schneider both a girlish innocence in matters of love as well as a tragic pragmatism in the face of strife, while Jeffrey Kennes, playing Schneider’s Jewish lover Herr Schultz, gives his character both a sensible gravity and a sweet joviality. The two played off each other so beautifully that their engagement drew cheers, and Schneider’s decision to break off the engagement broke at least one person’s heart.
The “main couple” of the production, however, is Sally Bowles (Rachel Hart) and Cliff Bradshaw (Kevin Matthew Wong). Bowles is a naïve, fun-loving British showgirl who longs to find a stable place in the world, and Rachel Hart plays her with the fluidity her character deserves, effortlessly peeling back the layers of her character. This makes Bowles’ final decisions to stay in Berlin and to abort her child all the more tragic, Hart shows her inner struggles so poignantly. Like Bowles, Bradshaw is a man from another world: a bisexual American writer living in increasingly fascist Berlin. From the first, Wong shows the character as one disgusted with his lack of success; he is struggling as a writer and clearly uncomfortable with his sexuality. As Bradshaw falls in love with Bowles, Wong plays the character with more self-assuredness; however, when it is revealed that Bradshaw has unwittingly helped the Nazi cause, Wong portrays Bradshaw’s discomfort with himself transforming into a horrified disgust, as he realizes that he has been “asleep” to the political realities over the past year.
While the acting was truly stellar, it would be a disservice to the show not to remark on the staging, choreography, and props, for several symbolic elements came through in these areas. The decision to have the Emcee and ensemble on the sides of the stage, either as an audience to the main action or in tableaux, contributed to an idea that the cabaret was always on the periphery, limiting and masking the main action of reality. Similarly, using the Nazis as props in the scene where Herr Schultz tries to convince Fraulein Schneider not to leave him creates an ironic atmosphere: surrounded by the Nazis, relying on them to hold or let go of the fruits that are his prized possessions, Schultz proclaims that there is no danger to him. Meanwhile, the orchestra lies behind a sheer gold cloth in the first half, and a sheer black one in the second. Visible throughout the production as they create an atmosphere of joy and later grief, one remembers that the cabaret is not real, merely a clever constructed world that claims to distract you from your troubles. Finally, the songs were choreographed wonderfully, with the powerfully performed “If You Could See Her” standing out for its demonstration of the horrifying way the propaganda of Nazi Germany permeated through ordinary society.
The aim of the production is very clear; as director Ola Okarmus says quite bluntly, “…for you, my dear audience, it is a story about the dangers of standing by and watching the end of a world.” In the final moments of the show, as the Emcee collapses, his words now spoken by Nazi Ernst Ludwig (Matthew Fonte), one really does feel that the world has collapsed as well. Life is not actually a cabaret, and Cabaret does not let you forget it.
