Several people asked me last week whether I had a good Independence Day weekend. My first reaction was that we didn’t do much, and then I thought for 30 seconds and realized that was not correct. In Santa Fe, they have a tradition of pancakes on the Plaza and a vintage car show. The pancakes were not on my diet, but the old cars did not add any calories. I have written about it before, but this year there were many more cars and so many more people that it was impossible to get good photos, but here is the one I did take.
The city’s fireworks display could hardly be seen from our house, but real excitement was provided a few hours earlier with the opening of the Santa Fe Playhouse’s production of “Cabaret” in the theater of the Scottish Rite Temple. On stage through July 19, it is particularly apt for this 250th anniversary of Independence.
The concept for the play originated from Christopher Isherwood’s “Good Bye to Berlin” published in 1939 and later included in his 1945 book “Berlin Stories”. This inspired a 1951 play, “I am a Camera” by John van Druten and a 1955 film. This in turn inspired the present Musical “Cabaret” with a book by Joe Masteroff and music and lyrics by Kander &Ebb. The musical opened on Broadway in 1966 and was a great success, winning awards, with a 1998 revival also winning awards. However, it is probably best known through its 1972 movie choreographed by Bob Fosse starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York, with Joel Gray, originator of the role of the Emcee on Broadway, and here is the Emcee played by Jeffrey Barba in the Santa Fe production.
The story is the thing, all based on Isherwood’s contemporary notes during his time in Berlin from 1929, when he moved to visit his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, and stayed until 1933. During that period, Isherwood enjoyed the city’s decadent cabaret scene and homosexual opportunities. In the current version of the musical, the ambience is depicted through the Kit Kat Club and its emcee. We are shown the dark before the storm in these hedonistic times at the beginning of the end of the Weimar Republic. Friendships were split as Jews were beginning to be discriminated against. In 1933, students in Munich burned books that were not approved of. That was the same year my father was thrown out of University there for being Jewish.
We all know where this ended, but it did not happen from one day to the next. Hitler did establish the first Concentration Camps as soon as he became Chancellor, but they were known as work camps in 1933. The “Final Solution” started slowly with Hitler’s 1939 "euthanasia" program. The gassing of those with disabilities progressed to the mass gassings of the Jews and others by late 1941.
The musical, however, does not go into all this horror but rather depicts what led up to it. Certain actions and phrases hit my wife and me very hard. The landlady in the show plans to marry the local fruit vendor, and she is warned that it “wouldn’t be wise”. The transition from the Weimar Republic to full throated Naziism is demonstrated when one of the characters throws off his jacket, revealing the swastika on his armband. As the play is coming to an end, the emcee pretends to have fallen for one of the girls in the Kit Kat Klub and sings a love song ending with the poignant line, “if you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all”.
A personal story about people’s defense or excuses: In the late 1970’s I went with my wife, who was then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, to see a private art collection outside Berlin. The collector was old and bedridden, so her caretaker led us upstairs. When she brought us down to leave, she must have recognized me as Jewish, and to my astonishment she grabbed my arm with both her hands and said, “We didn’t know, we didn’t know”!
Leaving the theater on July 4, 2026, we were haunted by the relevance of the final line of the play: “We were asleep”.
No comments:
Post a Comment