There may be no better place in the world to see Cabaret than Berlin. The musical has been performed countless times since John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 Broadway premiere, and its songs —“Willkommen,” “Mein Herr,” “Money, Money” and, of course, “Life Is a Cabaret” —have become part of the international vocabulary of musical theater. Yet seeing Cabaret in Berlin, the city in which its story is set, gives the production an additional dimension that no Broadway or touring production can quite duplicate.
At the TIPI AM KANZLERAMT, Cabaret isn’t simply being presented as a famous musical. It is being presented as a Berlin story, in Berlin. The production’s own tagline, “Where it really happened,” is therefore more than marketing.
The setting is particularly appropriate because Cabaret is based on the real experiences of British writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. Isherwood’s observations and stories became the foundation for John van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, which in turn inspired the musical. The Berlin of Cabaret is a city caught between extremes: liberated and decadent, exhilarating and frightening, politically turbulent yet still capable of extraordinary artistic freedom. Clifford Bradshaw arrives in 1929 looking for material for his writing and finds himself drawn into the Kit Kat Club and the life of Sally Bowles, an English nightclub singer.
That historical timing is crucial. The story takes place during the final years of the Weimar Republic, when Berlin had developed a reputation for nightlife, experimentation, sexual freedom and artistic expression. Cabarets and nightclubs flourished, and jazz—associated with modernity and American popular culture—was an important part of the city’s musical life. This was a period when Berlin could appear remarkably permissive, even as the political ground beneath it was shifting dramatically.
That contrast is what gives Cabaret its lasting power. The Nazis haven’t yet taken power, but they are increasingly impossible to ignore. The audience knows what the characters do not: the freedom they take for granted has an expiration date.
The production makes that tension especially effective because the Kit Kat Club initially seems like an escape from the outside world. Inside, anything appears possible. The performers are provocative, irreverent and sexually liberated; the audience is invited to forget politics and indulge in pleasure. Sally Bowles embodies that attitude. For her, life really is a cabaret, and politics is an unwelcome interruption.
But outside the club, history is closing in.
The most affecting example is the relationship between Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz. Their romance initially provides one of the production’s warmest and most human stories. Then comes the revelation that Herr Schultz is Jewish, and suddenly the increasingly hostile political environment is no longer something happening somewhere else. The threat enters their boarding house—and their personal lives. Schneider’s decision about their impending marriage becomes a heartbreaking illustration of how political intimidation can transform ordinary human choices.
That progression is one of the production’s greatest strengths. The Nazis don’t arrive as an abstract historical event at the beginning of the evening. Instead, their influence gradually infiltrates the story. A gesture, a threat, a change in someone’s behavior: little by little, the atmosphere changes. What initially looks like a celebration of freedom becomes something much darker.
And that makes the location almost part of the cast.
The TIPI AM KANZLERAMT itself is an unusually appropriate setting. The theater describes its mission as reviving the spirit of 1920s intelligent entertainment with a contemporary sensibility, and the venue has its own history as a site associated with Berlin’s entertainment culture. The tent theater is also located immediately beside the modern German Chancellery, creating an almost irresistible juxtaposition: a musical about a society watching democracy collapse, performed within sight of the center of today’s German government.
Director and choreographer Vincent Paterson’s production embraces the theatricality of the material. Paterson, whose credits include choreography for Madonna and Michael Jackson as well as Dancer in the Dark, brings considerable visual and physical energy to the show. The Kit Kat Club sequences have the sensuality and mischievousness one expects, but their entertainment value is never allowed to completely obscure the darkness developing around them.
Perhaps that is why Cabaret remains so effective nearly 60 years after the musical first appeared. It isn’t really a musical about Nazis. Nor is it simply a musical about a nightclub singer, a writer and a doomed romance. It is about what happens when people recognize that their world is changing—and choose, for as long as possible, to keep dancing.
Seeing it in Berlin makes that message impossible to ignore. The city that inspired Isherwood’s stories is no longer the city of 1929, of course. But Berlin has preserved its history with an unusual willingness to confront its darkest chapters. Watching Cabaret here, surrounded by the physical city whose history it dramatizes, turns a familiar musical into something more immediate.
The irony is delicious and unsettling: Cabaret celebrates a Berlin famous for its freedom while reminding us how quickly freedom can disappear.
Life may indeed be a cabaret. But in Berlin, this production reminds us that the music can stop.
photos: © Barbara Braun / TIPI AM KANZLERAMT
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