Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome! to Joe Masteroff’s Cabaret, coming to the Solvang Festival Theatre August 2–25! This production, part of PCPA’s summer series, is directed by Associate Artistic Director Emily Trask. For those who don’t know: The bones of this classic musical frame the anti-romance between an American and a showgirl who meet at the Kit Kat Klub in Berlin. The meat of the show is about living blindly, passively, refusing to attend to storms on the horizon.
“Set in the twilight of the Jazz Age, on the cusp of the horrors of the Third Reich, Berlin is a powder keg, and children are playing with matches,” says Trask.
Erika Olson, who plays Kit Kat Klub headliner Sally Bowles, says the cast has the word “Abgrundanziehung” posted in the rehearsal room. “It means ‘grabbed by precipice,’” she says. “It’s that excitement and fear you get looking over the edge of a cliff … It’s that feeling of dancing drunkenly on the edge of the world as it begins to burn. We want the audience to get whisked away by the allure of the Kit Kat Klub, at the delusional level of hope these characters have, unwilling to see that they are all walking into disaster.” Olson calls Sally’s swan song, “Cabaret,” beautiful and tragic — is “a peak Sally moment where she chooses to live in ignorance and turn a blind eye to the world around her.”
Though Cabaret originally premiered over half a century ago, it remains timeless as new generations continue to represent their style and messaging through it. “Cabaret is both irresistibly entertaining and genuinely subversive,” says Trask. “It challenges us to confront our own choices and complicity, be it through denial, privilege, or passive observation.” As the Nazi presence grows in Berlin, we see (through the characters’ inaction), that “in times of great injustice, mere observation is not enough,” says Trask.
See Cabaret at the Solvang Festival Theatre August 2-25, pcpa.org.
