Live Theater and the Yearning For Revolution

Christopher Barksdale as the Emcee in Musical Theater
Heritage's production of Cabaret (source)

I just got back from a regional production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret. Not being a particular fan of stage musicals, this is an outlier for me; but Cabaret’s incisive themes and jazz-influenced score remain timely in ways that many other musicals just don’t. Especially now, when forces of inclusion battle with small-F fascism for control of America, this play’s commentary on descent into violent intolerance remains painfully current.

For anyone unfamiliar, Cabaret features an American writer who travels to Weimar Germany to enjoy the libertine bacchanalia between the wars. He has a passionate but possibly loveless affair with Sally Bowles, a dancer at the Kit-Kat Club, a seedy jazz den and probable brothel. But while Sally desperately tries to hold her apolitical, shameless life, Berlin descends into reactionary backlash around them, and the Nazis emerge.

Producers at Musical Theater Heritage, a middle-range professional venue inside a Kansas City shopping mall, staged their performance to spotlight the contemporary American parallels. Weimar Germany was arguably the most permissive society that’s ever existed for queer people, had a reasonably relaxed attitude about abortion, and mostly let people be. But beneath this surface, ordinary resentments fermented into outrage and bigotry.

Leaving the theater, I experienced conflicting emotions. I appreciated the company’s willingness to engage with current themes in a 56-year-old play. Casting a Black actor as the amoral Emcee, the play’s Greek Chorus role, against a racially mixed ensemble of Kit-Kat Girls, was a good modernizing touch. In Musical Theater Heritage’s capable hands, Cabaret became an insightful commentary on the American battle between libertinism and paranoia.

However, I also realize the audience is deeply self-selecting. People who attend theater run generally progressive, and the audience is narrowed further by the admission price: with taxes and fees, this show ran $65 per seat, a luxurious indulgence for working-class audiences like me. In attempting to engage today’s political themes, the producers strive to induce revolutionary impulses in already committed audiences like… well, honestly, like me.

Julie Pope as Sally Bowles in Musical Theater
Heritage's production of Cabaret (source)

Film critic Lindsay Ellis has noted elsewhere that theater people often consider ourselves revolutionaries. We want to engage our society’s moral center and provoke change, which we attempt by showing humans going through outrageous scenarios. In Cabaret, young writer Clifford Bradshaw’s political engagement contrasts with Sally Bowles’ refusal to believe anything is changing. Those who care, pay the price of watching those they love living to be tortured and murdered.

However, as Ellis rightly asserts, in a culture characterized by passive entertainments, theater is a poor channel for revolution. Not because it doesn’t engage the audience’s sentiments; it definitely does that. But for an audience to transport themselves to a theater building, buy tickets, and sit down for engagement with the show, that audience already has a level of investment. Preaching revolution to that audience is preaching to the converted.

Contemporary American society provides constant entertainment. One can watch television, stream movies, and download books without getting out of bed. These entertainments require little moral investment from audiences: much as I enjoyed Sandman, I didn’t pour my emotional weight into the experience. I watched the show in bed from my tablet, lying flat on my back, in my jammies. The experience was smart and complex, but also very, very passive.

Cabaret required me to already care enough to buy tickets, get dressed, and travel into Kansas City. In other words, it required me to already care. Surrounded by low-cost streaming services that reward me for not caring, who can blame most people— tired, underpaid, and constantly surrounded by images of widespread American injustice— for not wanting to care? Honestly, most of us don’t have much to show for caring anyway.

In Shakespeare’s day, audiences paid a penny to crowd around a sweaty, overpopulated center pit with no air conditioning or restrooms. In those days, Hamlet and King Lear were popular entertainment, consumed as eagerly as television. No wonder the Jacobites invented the concept of “theater etiquette,” of staring silently forward and applauding only at designated intervals. Because back then, attending the theater really could spur revolutionary impulses among the unwashed.

But today, advancing technology has invented new ways to encourage passivity. Plays written for the unlettered crowds now seem impossibly dense. Even shows like Cabaret, with its message that “it really could happen here,” require an investment audiences don’t have to make unless they already care. And why should they care? Amid our constant push-pull of injustice against entertainment, I can’t blame most people from avoiding that depth of feeling.