Most of you are aware I am a big fan of Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret, particularly because of its themes of Nazi Germany and the parallels I see with that era and our own. The film was preceded by a musical Broadway play, and prior to that by a postwar novel by Christopher Isherwood. Scott Miller’s critical analysis is quite lengthy, but well worth reading, I highly recommend it. You may be interested in knowing that I have only recently discovered it, and am delighted to see how much his thinking parallels my own. No, it wasn’t the other way round. At any rate, he articulates many of my own ideas, but in a clear and lucid way I have not yet been able to duplicate.

Not much has changed politically in this country since 2001. There is only more of the same. Cabaret, like all art, may illuminate the times in which it is set, but it also casts a bright light on our own. Read this and find out.

Inside Cabaret — Background and Analysis
by Scott Miller (2001)

http://www.newlinetheatre.com/cabaretchapter.html

The burgeoning political activism in the United States when Cabaret hit the stage in 1966 – and its growth by 1972 when the film hit theatres – as well as Hal Prince’s desire to break through to a new kind of socially responsible musical theatre all conspired to make Cabaret one of the most fascinating stage pieces of the 1960s and a show that speaks to our world in a new millennium more now than at any time since it first opened, as evidenced by the smash hit Broadway revival. The singer Sally Bowles represents the people who kept their eyes shut to changes in the world around them, and the novelist Clifford Bradshaw represents the new (perhaps naïve) breed of American activist who could no longer sit by and watch the government ignore the will of the people. Today, as activism at both ends of the political spectrum has experienced a renaissance in America, Cabaret as a cautionary morality play has tremendous resonance.

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What’s most disturbing about the show today is that Cabaret shows how politicians in 1930s Germany used the same tactics as politicians in America in 2001. The Germans saw their country in economic and political trouble, due to crippling war debts from World War I and a deadlocked parliament. The Nazis decided that, like Harold Hill and the pool table in The Music Man, they had to find a scapegoat on which to pin Germany’s troubles. Their plan was to scare ordinary Germans with descriptions of rampant immorality and decadence so that the people would vote for the Nazis in hopes that the Nazis would return Germany to the Good Ol’ Days. The Nazis found their scapegoat in the sexual freedom of the cosmopolitan big city Berlin. Throughout the history of the world, people in power have always sexualized their enemies, portraying the minority as sexually dangerous and destructive, convincing the masses that the “rampant” sexuality must be contained, and the Nazis had learned well from history. The truth is neither homosexuals nor women were responsible for Germany’s war debts or the deadlock in the parliament, but the truth is often less important than emotion and fear. What’s truly disturbing is to realize that right wing politicians in America use the same tactics today, blaming homosexuals (the only American minority it’s still acceptable to demonize) and sexual freedom in general for all America’s troubles. The only difference is that there’s no Adolf Hitler waiting to seize power.

At least not right now.