Cabaret

Cabaret begins in a gaudy nightclub where a mincing, smirking, clown-faced master of ceremonies sings an impudent song of welcome to the cabaret’s uneasy customers, promising them naughty songs and enticingly half-dressed girls, all of which are indeed delivered.

The musical tells the tale of Sally Bowles, an English girl who has fled her family’s stuffiness to become a chanteuse at the Kit Kat Klub (“Don’t Tell Mama” is her bouncy opening number). The Kit Kat is a brassy pleasure-haunt of pre-Hitler Berlin where anxiety-ridden Germans sought to blur their vision of impending disaster with wild night life and joyless sin. Sally meets the young American Clifford Bradshaw, with whom she has a love affair. Their romance inevitably founders because Sally, half-tart and half-innocent, cannot give up her raffish nightclub existence. Andrew Holtz directs.