A look at what a 58-year-old musical says about today’s politics

As the counterculture movement was heating up in the 1960s, the musical Cabaret debuted on Broadway. An ironic and challenging study of the blend of decadence and poverty of 1929-30 Berlin, the award-winning show carried a heavy warning, as it depicted the way the Nazis insidiously tapped into anti-LGBTQ sentiments, nationalism, economic strain and antisemitism to drive their rise to power.

Last night, we saw a production in Breckenridge, Colorado. This was our local version of a far more elaborate revival of the show now running in New York City and the one that is a hot ticket in London; it opened in the U.K. in late 2021 and is slated to run there at least until early 2025. The musical – an odd mix of sly entertainment and depressing political cautions — left me with many questions.

For one, why is a 58-year-old show being revived now? What resonance could it have in our day, compared with the 1960s?

For another, would audiences and critics warm to it again, as they did in its first run (1,166 performances in New York and eight Tony Awards)? And why did the 1972 movie, featuring Liza Minelli and Joel Grey, win a slew of “best” awards, including best picture and best director prizes? How impressive was it that, in 1995, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”?

The answers it seems, are complicated. First, the new production of Cabaret, in London and New York, is not the first major revival, as the theatre collection curator of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts recounts. New York productions were staged in 1966, 1987, 1998 and 2014, and others were mounted in London. So, the core message of the piece has long been with us, requiring a reminder every decade or so.

The original director, Hal Prince, “wanted the audience to understand that the musical was not only about the hedonism and antisemitism of Berlin in the interwar period, but also about the United States in the mid-1960s,” library curator Douglas Reside writes. “Both cultures indulged in a drug-fueled sexual revolution at a time in which basic civil rights were denied to minority groups.”

How contemporary was the show then – and now? “Prince often recounted his memory of bringing an image of shirtless young men snarling at the camera to rehearsal,” Reside adds. “He noted that his cast suggested the image came from Nazi Germany, when in fact it was a photo from a recent Life magazine issue—white supremacists protesting the integration of a public school.”

So, the theme of being drawn in by seductive and entertaining escapism at a time when repression is just around the corner, sadly, has long had an appeal. Perhaps that’s because the forces of such repression – the Nazis in the 1930s, the white supremacists of the 1960s and, perhaps, the would-be oppressors of today’s GOP (supported by modern Nazis and supremacists) – have long been with us. Until they can dominate, they prowl about on the fringes of society and culture.

Think about the forms today’s reactionaries take. On the social front, we have book-banning (not all that dissimilar to burning), antisemitism (moving in from the fringes to show up on college campuses), anti-LGBTQ sentiments (often driven by right-wing religious ideas), rekindled racism against Blacks and other minorities, including immigrants, and antiabortion efforts (also religiously motivated).

And on the political front we have a party that uses such themes to gain a following. The Trumpist Republican party is keen to centralize federal power in the presidency (dictator for a day, as the former president put it, as well as his Supreme Court’s effort to grant exceptional immunity to the chief executive). We also have promises to remake the federal workforce into one answerable to political masters. And we have open admiration of autocrats around the world and disdain for democracy among the politicians and their supporters.

Consider the comments of Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who long supported now-vice presidential nominee JD Vance and the GOP.  He gave $1 million to Trump in 2016 and spoke at the GOP convention back then, pulled back on his political donations for a time afterward, and now seems to be moving back toward supporting the Republican nominee.  While he hasn’t endorsed Trump again, before President Biden’s withdrawal Thiel said he would vote for Trump over the president.

“I don’t think we’re ever in a cyclical world but there are certainly certain parallels in the U.S. in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s,” the German-born Thiel said in a podcast in February. “Liberalism is exhausted, one suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted, and that we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton window.”

As Newsweek reported, the Overton window means the range of views or opinions considered politically acceptable at a given time.

Cabaret, of course, reflects some of those parallels, but in much the opposite way to the manner in which the Stanford-educated Thiel sees them. The show at once celebrates the sexual freedoms of pre-war Berlin even as it suggests that the self-indulgences and, in some cases, the depravity of the era were a narcotic blinding people to the rise of the Nazis.

Those sexual freedoms would be condemned, of course, by many in Trump’s legions, even as they overlook their candidate’s long-known hedonism. It’s perhaps ironic that Thiel is married to a man, since the show aims in part to condemn the victimization of gays by the Nazis. But Thiel seems willing to overlook the anti-gay sentiment that drives so many in the Trump coalition in favor of broader political aims.

As The New York Times wrote, Thiel’s politics have mutated over time, though he has long had a libertarian bent. In 2009, Thiel wrote that he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He argued that American politics would always be hostile to free-market ideals, and that politics was about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. Since then, the Times noted, he has hosted and attended events with white nationalists and alt-right figures.

Scary stuff, frankly. The main Nazi character in Cabaret, smuggler Ernst Ludwig, comes across for most of the piece as a decent fellow. Ultimately, of course, he turns on the American writer protagonist, Clifford Bradshaw, and on a Jewish-Christian couple. Ludwig is reminiscent of the true believers one now sees all around Trump, people whose peculiar world views drive them into illegality, into believing that democracy is a failed system better scrapped.

One thinks of a recent commentary by Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson. “It is up to us to decide whether we want a country based on fear or on facts, on reaction or on reality, on hatred or on hope,” she writes. “It is up to us whether it will be fascism or democracy that, in the end, moves swiftly, and up to us whether we will choose to follow in the footsteps of those Americans who came before us in our noblest moments, and launch a brand new era in American history.”

Like our politics, Cabaret is filled with contradictions (or, perhaps, ironies). How can a musical both celebrate sexual freedom and blame its excesses for political myopia or willing blindness? By the same token, how can a candidate who has been as licentious as they come be a hero to the religious right? How can otherwise bright people — many in Trump’s camp boast Harvard educations — be drawn to a man who boasts of loving the underschooled? How can anyone be drawn to a convicted felon, one found to be a sexual abuser, whose dishonesty is legendary?

In the show, the most memorable song, the one featuring the line, “Life is a cabaret, old chum,” sounds at first like a joyous celebration of life, of course. But we see how it becomes all about fear and sorrow. Its downbeat lines have been trimmed from some popular recorded versions, but they linger in the stage production, an ode to a friend who was an alcoholic prostitute who died early.

Based on a 1951 play that was rooted in Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel, “Goodbye to Berlin,” Cabaret makes one think hard about the effects of politics that one can’t ignore. It has done so for decades so far, as it has spoken to a few generations. Let’s hope that the show remains cautionary and thought-provoking. The great fear is that it could prove prescient.