Cabaret: “Governments Come, Governments Go”

What would you do?

“Four P-51 Mustangs flying in formation. Ramitelli, Italy, March 1945.” The United States Army Air Force Fighter Group, 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing was an all African-American military pilots called the Tuskegee Airmen or “Red Tails”. All rights © photographer Toni Frissell, 1945. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.

[Spoilers ahead]

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Fruit is scarce, rent is exorbitant, and good jobs are hard to find. But Berlin’s nightlife throbs with bacchanalian indulgence.

As the Weimar Republic is collapsing and the Nazi party usurps control, libertines, communists, and expat intellectuals are still carousing around Berlin’s cabarets, cafes, bohemian salons, and literary coteries. Art, music, dance, literature, and political debate keep pulsing throughout a city descending into tyranny.

The Great Depression had already crushed the Roaring Twenties in the U.S., but Europeans were still reveling in the last rollicking gasps of Germany’s Goldene Zwanziger and France’s les Années folles.

The good times were still rolling. The Great War had surely been the “war to end all wars.” The spectre of a second world war was impossible. Right?

One story has both celebrated and exposed the tightrope walk across that interregnum since 1939.

“Cabaret” endures as a bellwether straddling the temptation of hedonistic escapism and the reality of rising fascism.

Decade by decade, from page to stage, each iteration has been a torch-passing of creativity and complexity, anthropologically excavating layers of our sociopolitical past.

“Cabaret” actually began 100 years ago.

When Oxford University asked an unserious student to leave in 1925, long before he became a key figure in gay liberation literature or a Hindu convert, that young English writer eventually made his way to Germany. In 1939, Christopher Isherwood published “Goodbye to Berlin”, a semi-autobiographical swan song to the decadent idealism of the interwar years.

“Anne Margaret Angus praised Isherwood’s mastery in conveying the despair of Berlin’s denizens and ‘their hopeless clinging to the pleasures of the moment.’”

That book became the basis for John Van Druten’s 1951 “I Am Camera” Broadway play. And that play became a 1955 film. Which became a 1966 musical by playwright and WWII Veteran Joe Masteroff, with lyrics by Fred Ebb and music by John Kander, winning eight Tony Awards.

Then came Bob Fosse’s choreography for the 1972 film that catapulted Liza Minelli from Judy Garland’s daughter to a household name in her own right. Minelli epitomized the fictional British flapper and Jazz Age chanteuse Sally Bowles. No one before or since has more iconically portrayed the real-life Jean Ross that Isherwood briefly lived with in Berlin.

The play is unflinching in depicting the debauchery of the times and the danger for women, whose employment and livelihoods were all too often dependent on extorted sex and illegal abortions.

Now, in 2026, in the “Covered Bridge Capital of the West”, a small-stage production in a town of 10,000 takes a boldly confrontational stance. As ICE continues to round up our neighbors without due process and women’s equality from voting rights to health care access are again on the line, the Cottage Theatre’s longtime director Kory Weimer writes that the beating heart of “Cabaret” is one simple question: What would you do?

Dear reader, it’s not just a question for 1931 Berlin.

And the answer isn’t just a choice or a personal preference. It’s a moral obligation. It’s a calling for the greater good.

As Weimer explains it, “Cabaret” gives us four options.

You can “obey in advance”, as innkeeper Fräulein Schneider does in breaking her engagement to Jewish shopkeeper Herr Schultz. The never-married “spinster” who’s always survived on her own fears that if she marries a Jewish man, it’s only a matter of time before the authorities revoke her license to rent rooms. She is afraid that she won’t be able to financially support herself anymore.

You can hope for the best. Herr Schultz isn’t just an affable neighborhood fixture; he’s the grandfatherly type everyone wants to call family. Even after Fräulein Schneider breaks their engagement, he still wants to do what he thinks is best for her. And he still thinks “we’re” all in the same thing together, and that the rising violence against Jewish Germans is only temporary.

“Governments come and governments go,” he reassures American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Christopher Isherwood’s author surrogate).

When Bradshaw finds out he’s actually been smuggling for the Nazis, he immediately tries to sever ties with his Berlin “friends”, to catch the next train to Paris, and the next flight to the U.S.

He sees the writing on the wall, but in his clear-eyed panic, he fails to realize that fleeing isn’t an option for everyone. He has an American passport. He has somewhere to run to, not just from.

Sally Bowles chooses willful ignorance.

“The party’s over,” Bradshaw screams at her and slaps her across the face. Like so many women before the term “domestic violence” existed, she shrugs off the assault without even acknowledging it.

She wants to keep singing, to keep performing. She has no desire to follow her likely homosexual bedfellow to his original home in Pennsylvania. Like Herr Schultz, she wants to believe everything is fine.

Obeying in advance. Hopeful optimism. Willful but blissful ignorance. Fleeing.

These are deeply human reactions when overwhelmed with danger and fear.

But what if, with peaceful conviction, with bravery and compassion, we take a fifth option? Together?

In the Cottage Theatre’s rendition of this classic, a projector changes digital backdrops for different scenes; the inside of a train, the standard red velvet curtains for the Kit Kat Club, the drab wall of a one-room rental, and stacked baskets of fruit at Herr Schultz’s stand.

They project images behind the small orchestra as set dressing.

In the final, terrifyingly violent scene, we, the audience, are suddenly the backdrop. The camera projects a live stream on the movie screen — of us. It silently, shockingly breaks the fourth wall. We are a part of the scene now. The already solemn audience was stunned. We could only eek out a barely audible but collective gasp when we saw ourselves on screen.

Now we have to answer the question too. Will we intervene? Or will we just be bystanders to the most horrific cruelty man is capable of? Will we be complicit? Will we help our neighbors?

Before we can get in our cars and rave about Sophie Warren-Blades’ powerhouse singing as Sophie Bowles, and gush about how charmingly Nancy West and Larry Brown blushed with “young love” as Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, how commanding Chelsea Lovejoy is as The Emcee, we have to ask ourselves who we actually are. What do we actually believe? What we’re willing to fight for?

“If you leave this production with a feeling of unease, disquiet, or perhaps even anger, then we as the cast and crew have done our job. Because sometimes, when we look in the mirror, we do not like what we see reflected back at us,” Director Weimer writes. “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome. But don’t get too comfortable …”

We’ll drive home; back to the real world. Where tyranny is again on the rise.

“What would you do?” is not just a hypothetical question for fictional characters. History is repeating itself. And the temptation for distraction and entertainment is strong, acutely so when we feel powerless, when despair is daily.

Director Weimer clarifies that the mission of both art and the artist isn’t distraction or entertainment, but to compel society to self-reflect.

Yes, “Cabaret” is a bawdy up-tempo Broadway classic. But most impressively, it’s a theatrical song-and-dance Trojan horse, demanding to know what we will do to prevent fascism, to stop a tyrannical government, and whether or not we will protect our neighbors.

Friends, we must not hopelessly cling to the pleasures of distraction and entertainment. We must not get too comfortable.

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