Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome
Im Cabaret, au Cabaret, to Cabaret
Meine Damen und Herren, Mesdames et Messieurs,
Ladies and Gentlemen! to Berlin!
Or Perhaps
2025 America
Oh the similarities are certainly there. But I'll not get deep into it and neither did this production. It was on the tip of everyone's tongue yet it need not be spoken.
So I drove my butt on over to Orlando on what I thought would be a very mild mannered average Sunday afternoon but it turned out to be a hellish, horrendous, traffic nightmare. I don't even want to talk about it. I'm still trying to get over it. I don't know if it was because unbeknownst to me when I booked my tickets to this show over a month ago I didn't realize that this would be Super Bowl Sunday and maybe a lot of people would be out and about going to their neighborhood sports bars or whatever or if they were other reasons why it seemed like everybody in the entire fucking state of Florida was out on the roads today but it was horrible. In any event, I made it, and as hellacious as the journey to get to the Big O was, I guess it was worth it since this was an absolutely outstanding and stupendous performance. Of course I'm talking about the Orlando Shakes' Cabaret.
Now let me warn you right off the bat, this ain't the movie version. It's quite a bit different, it's the actual Broadway version that the movie was based on from the original Christopher Isherwood novels and let me tell you, it hits home in a very different way. Though the two productions share a lot of similarities, I'd say since they diverge in extremely big ways, it's almost like they're two different musicals based on a similar story. This version probably would not have been made successfully into a movie with anything less than an X rating in 1972. It's just way too controversial in subject matter and what would then have been considered sexual deviation to be ready for your regular Cinemax theaters back then.
For theatergoers, especially in the 60s where they were a little bit more refined and cultured than even I think today's more pussified types, it's totally fine. You got to remember, in the 60s, Broadway dealt with totally nude performances on stage so having depictions of outright homosexuality, orgies, blatant prostitution, transgenderism, perhaps a suggestion of bestiality, not to mention all the imagery of Nazism, anti-semitism, and throw in a few other isms here and there whenever you want, this ain't your grandpa's musical like "Oklahoma!."
They had a warning about some of the potential sensitive material of the musical at the beginning of the production that was announced out to the audience and suggested that if it was a bit too much that any audience member would be invited to step on out if they needed to. I kind of thought that was absolutely hilarious since who the hell would have bought tickets to this not knowing what they were getting into. But then again, I looked around the audience from my vantage point, and it did appear that a few people did in fact disappear mid-production and didn't return. My assumption though is that it wasn't so much that the material was too much for them to handle, but that I think they probably thought it would be like the 1972 movie and since it wasn't it was a turnoff for them.
Now, if you ask me between this production and the movie which do I prefer? That's pretty hard to ask since I really do feel they really are two different stories. The two plots actually are quite different. The movie deals a lot with an American Kit Kat Club performer played by Liza Minnelli hooking up with a bisexual, perhaps, (the movie leaves that pretty ambiguous), Michael York, and focuses primarily on them totally leaving out the story of the elderly couple in the play version which is a big focus of the performance I watched today.
I got to say that their story, an older gentile lady running a boarding house, being wooed by an older Jewish gentleman, and the ensuing romance and tragic disintegration of their relationship due to the genteel ladies association with her Nazi neighbors is really a poignant and integral story that I think is sad to have been lost in the movie. The songs that accompany their rising and then collapsing romance are incredible. And if I can say, how often is it in any story be it literature, cinema, theater, whatever, where we ever are entertained by the idea of a November-November romance? Old people are too often cast aside. If they're used at all it's only as a counterpoint or as a way of accenting the youth of a more juvenile player pivoted against them. I applaud the fact that so much time is spent in this performance with these two characters and their story. And it doesn't hurt that the two actors Mark Gray Miller and Anne Hering playing the part of Herr Shultz and Fraulein Schneider respectively do a phenomenal job in both their acting and vocals.
But in this performance if we're going to talk vocals, we really need to talk about Anastasia Remoundos (Sally Bowles). Now was her acting stellar? Nah. Especially her English accent was a bit weak and her chemistry with her counterpart leading man Easton Curtis (Clifford Bradshaw) left a bit to be desired, but man could she belt it out! Oh and about Curtis, I'm not even going to mention him any further. Whoever cast him should have been fired, he was the weakest link in the whole show and it's sad because he was such a main character. If they had only cast somebody better this performance would have been ratcheted up to astronomical levels. But what're you going to do?
Kudos though, to the choice for Emcee, Shane Bland. He was marvelous. And I assume his pronoun but one never knows because he played it mysteriously fluid as I think this role should be. Joel Gray played it waveringly enough between that ephemeral barrier of male versus female to be quizzically androgynous as well as quirky for his time, but I think it was Alan Cumming's version of the Emcee who really started to open up the whole gender fluidity in this role. And our Shane does it so well with their makeup, pearls, and ketibo attitude. Reminds me very much of the last time I was in this theater watching Kinky Boots seeing our fierce drag queen protagonist and how she commanded her environment.
Perhaps our Emcee's most poignant moves come at the very end of our performance though. As we are led to assume that years have passed since the tragic dissolution of our protagonists' nebulous relationship, and that the political climate of the country has grown darker and darker, the Kit Kat Club starts to become a shell of its former self, chairs thrown askew, the orchestra no longer in its place, and its employees file out, one by one, being handed by the Emcee, dressed in a dark outfit, their little patches which they must now place upon their left breast. Pink triangles, blue triangles, black triangles, yellow Star of Davids.
Then our Emcee slowly makes his way to the center of the stage where now the spotlight illuminates him as he disrobes and reveals that underneath the dark exterior garment he wears no makeup, just a gaunt face and is clad in nothing more than a drab prison uniform in vertical gray and white stripes with his own yellow Star of David patch, and as he walks off stage the spotlight illuminates a pile of rubble in mid-stage as what looks like ashes faintly float down from above.
The audience remains silent for a full minute.
And then raucous applause for the outstanding performance of this troupe. What an effort! Why I think it was so wonderful, let's ask President Trump and Elon Musk what they think. Oh, they sent their response in the form of a video message for us to listen to and adhere to...I think this will soon replace YMCA. It's pretty much in the same vein, right?
EDIT: BTW, here's a look at my vantage point from the furthest back seats in the house. You can't go wrong at this theater! I love it!
