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On Joel Grey and ‘Cabaret’
Reflections on the current state of things, through the prism of the famed Broadway musical and film
Actor Joel Grey had an unsettling op-ed piece in The New York Times over the weekend, and it reminded me of seeing Cabaret on stage nearly twenty years ago and the gobsmack ending.
Grey played the iconic role — actually, I should say he made the role iconic — of the flamboyant Berlin nightclub emcee in the 1966 Broadway production, winning a Tony. He reprised the role in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation, winning an Oscar. He’s now 92 years old.
For those not familiar with either: The action plays out during the “jazz age” of Weimar Germany as the Nazi Party is coming to power. It’s set in the Kit Kat Club, where the Emcee gleefully feeds the audience hedonistic piles of bread and circuses while fascism bears down on them — “through the back door,” as Grey put it.
They are oblivious to the storm that is coming.
In his New York Times piece, Gray described Cabaret as a “portrayal of a decadent society willfully ignorant of its own demise (and) a warning against the seductive power of distraction, the dangers of apathy and the perils of looking away when history demands that we look closer.”
“Only when the Nazis finally show up do we see how false our velvet-enrobed sense of security has been,” he continues. “We, too, have chosen not to see what has been directly in front of us.”
I hardly need explain how this relates to our present situation.
I was a Cabaret virgin when I saw it on stage in 2005. I hadn’t seen the film at that point, so even though I obviously knew about Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, I didn’t know how this particular story ended.
The final scene blew me away.
In the excellent production I saw, mounted by a non-profit amateur theater in Oregon, the play ended with the cast on stage, all having removed a piece of costume to reveal a yellow star, tagging them as Jews who would soon find themselves in boxcars. (In a 2014 Broadway revival with Alan Cumming, playing the role for the third time, he removes his Gestapo-esque leather coat to reveal a striped concentration camp uniform).
