If You Could
The line is, without a doubt, inflammatory: “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
Outrageous, right? And consider the context: the character in charge of delivering the line is singing it about a literal gorilla, with whom he’s cavorting onstage: “She's clever, she's smart, she reads music,” the character sings. “She doesn't smoke or drink gin.” He goes on: “Yet when we're walking together/They sneer if I'm holding her hand/But if they could see her through my eyes/Maybe they'd all understand.” In a traditional staging, the ape—the “her” in question—is seen wearing a frilly dress, perhaps holding a handbag and/or a parasol. She wears makeup, but she is a revolting beast. And then, the Emcee—the star of the show, if not the protagonist—sneers that gut-punch of a final rhyme: “I understand your objection/I grant you the problem's not small/But if you could see her through my eyes…”
What happens next is one of the crucial conundrums posed to any Emcee. How do you deliver the most controversial line in all of Cabaret? What do you do with that moment? “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” How do you handle such a hot coal?
The answer, if you’re Adam Lambert, Broadway’s current Emcee, is to stop the show to pitch an extended fit, triggering a nosedive into an existential spiral for at least one humble theatergoer.
But before I tell you that story, I have to tell you this story…
The original Broadway production of Cabaret was directed by Harold “Hal” Prince, arguably the greatest, and inarguably one of the most influential, producers and directors in stage history. Prince’s résumé reads more like a rundown of Broadway’s greatest hits: he co-produced The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, and West Side Story; he holds a sole producer credit on Fiddler on the Roof, while he both produced and directed Cabaret, Company, Follies, and A Little Night Music. Sloughing off producing responsibilities, he directed Sweeney Todd, Evita, Merrily We Roll Along, and Phantom of the Opera—and that’s just picking and choosing the highlights.
Cabaret was a Prince brainchild, and he was the one who brought aboard the composing duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb to adapt Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood’s book is an autobiographical coming-of-age tale inspired by his own experiences living with Jean Ross, a singer in the Weimar Germany club scene. The novel was adapted as the 1951 play I Am A Camera, which was in turn adapted as the 1955 film of the same title. That title comes from the mantra Isherwood (Laurence Harvey, playing a character by the author’s real name) repeats to himself as he witnesses the atrocities of the Nazi party rising in the streets. Gazing motionless from his window, he tells himself that by recording what he sees, he is practicing a form of resistance: “I am a camera,” he whispers as he watches a handful of young men with telltale armbands brutalize a civilian who might be Jewish, or perhaps simply different.
The protagonist of Cabaret is not named Christopher Isherwood. Rather, this musical tale of a young writer named Cliff, and his songstress roommate Sally, strays rather far from its ostensible inspiration, not least in the introduction of the Emcee. This character has no equivalent in Goodbye to Berlin or I Am A Camera; rather, he was created by Hal Prince, who’d apparently encountered a figure along these lines while stationed in Germany during the Korean War. Based on the character as portrayed first by Joel Grey, later by Alan Cumming, and even later by Adam Lambert, it’s hard to envision quite what Prince could have seen in reality. The Emcee is one of Broadway’s most indelible creations, a spritely, lightly mephistophelean figure who appears between scenes of the main action to comment ironically on what we’ve just witnessed. When Sally moves in with Cliff, we get the lascivious “Two Ladies,” which doesn’t really have anything to do with the prior scene but does involve cohabitation. “Money” follows a discussion of money—that’s how the play moves, and every time the Emcee is offstage, you tend to wish he was back.
Joel Grey’s Emcee was an elfin little man in pancake makeup and rouge, top hat and tails. I obviously haven’t seen Prince’s original 1966 production, but I have had the opportunity to view a tape of the 1987 revival that brought Prince and Grey back to the stage for a perfectly-preserved recreation of that landmark production. One key component of that production was the onstage mirror, a massive pane of glass that reflected the audience’s image back on themselves, never allowing them to forget that they were in the position of the club-goers, enjoying a night of light entertainment in defiance—or, perhaps, willful ignorance—of a horrific world. Cabaret was an early example of the so-called “concept musical,” a term essentially invented for Hal Prince shows. If the “concept” behind Company (the very concept of relationships) was more central than any thin plot (will Bobby settle down?), then in Cabaret, the plot (will Cliff and Sally evade the rise of the Nazis and live happily ever after?) takes a clear backseat to the “concept” (the sociological makeup of Weimar Germany).
Prince’s staging is, more or less, flawless, constructed out of choices that are striking and instantly iconic. Quite likely the most chilling song in Cabaret is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” which floats between deliverers in different productions. In Prince’s original conception, it’s sung by a handful of red-jacketed cabaret waiters, whom, we now recognize, are a crowd of steely-eyed Aryan men. Tomorrow, they assure us, belongs not to these freaks but to them. The moment is deeply upsetting onstage (and oppressively so in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film adaptation, in which the song sweeps through a garden party, a sweet tune becoming increasingly authoritarian), and director Sam Mendes chose not to recreate it for his revival in the 1990s. In that production, which has become something of a definitive version of Cabaret, Alan Cumming's Emcee listens to the song on a record, enjoying the tune but experiencing a somewhat ambiguous reaction to it, inviting the audience to make what they will of the implications of the moment.
This is where the power of Cabaret lives: in its queasy ambiguities. Cabaret does not have a particularly subtle script—it’s dense with gut-punch moments like the “surprise” revelation of a character’s red armband, or the brick hurled through the window of a Jewish-owned shop, and characters frequently express their feelings in blunt-force declarations concerning how difficult it is to live through the start of Nazi Germany. This is the essential unsubtlety of Cabaret; it does all the work for you. This allows a smart director—a Prince or a Mendes—to invent moments of grace, generating an evening of deft theatricality out of raw material that often has all the grace of a sledgehammer.
Which brings us to the Kit Kat Club.
The new Broadway revival of Cabaret is being billed as Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, foregrounding the ostensibly remarkable formal qualities of the evening. This is, purportedly, an immersive Cabaret. The FAQ section of the show’s official website repeatedly goads prospective theatergoers into arriving early to settle in, relax, enjoy pre-show drinks and entertainment and “be yourself.” The venue—the August Wilson Theatre—has been remodeled into the round, with a raised platform encircled not just by theater seats but by a couple of rows of cocktail tables, complete with tiny lamps and (a crucial Cabaret prop) telephones. A few minutes before the listed start time, the stage is overtaken by the ensemble, who cavort in outrageous displays of contortion and eroticism until the emergence of Adam Lambert’s Emcee, who bursts from below the stage like a model erupting from a cake.
If (in my estimation) you’re supposed to miss the Emcee when he’s not around, that must mean the character thrives on a certain level of charisma. This vision of the character is presented as an open grotesque, the embodiment of…something it’s hard to define. His frequent costume changes seem to signify hedonism and excess in some manner, though really all they demonstrate is outrageousness. This Cabaret seems driven by one of Sally’s lines: “I say, am I shocking you?” This production would love to shock, at one point simulating pulling everything from baguettes to whisks out of a derriere. And yet it hits the “taboo” button so hard and so fast that it has nothing to build to. One of Hal Prince’s guiding principles was a question: If you have Nazis at the beginning, where do you have to go? This production keeps the Nazis obscured, as Cabaret does. But I have to ask: if you have outrageous sex at the beginning, where do you have to go?
This is one of the primary sins of the new Cabaret: it is fundamentally boring, a one-trick show that thinks it’s a thrill ride. There is only one electrifying moment in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, and it did make me sit up at attention, but only in the sense that I realized I was on the precipice of a full existential spiral.
To begin with: they went realistic with the gorilla. When the Emcee emerges to sing “If You Could See Her,” it’s not with the classic fancy dress ape, but rather a gorilla so naturalistic you might wonder for half a moment if it is real. This amplifies the danger and transgression of the scene, certainly, though not in ways I’d necessarily argue enhance the text.
The gorilla chases the Emcee about while Lambert makes a real meal out of the faux sentimentality of the scene. And this past Monday night, I sat there in the audience (in a seat just behind the apparently first-class seats that got complimentary panna cottas during intermission) waiting to see what would happen when the time came for the most controversial line in all of Cabaret.
If Lambert made a meal out of the leadup, he made a feast of the line itself, pausing for effect between every second word. It hung awkwardly in the air. And then, naturally, there were scattered uncomfortable chuckles.
Now let’s step back for a second. There is something called absurdism. This notion of the absurd in theater refers to moments wherein we are confronted by something deeply uncomfortable, something that makes us feel that things are not all right—that what we expect from theater has been violated. There are two ways to respond to this: one is to be aghast and horrified. This is an even more uncomfortable way to feel! And so people tend to go for the alternative: a little anxious chuckle that lets them believe everything is all right, and seek confirmation of that fact from those around them. A moment of absurd tension (in the words of Martin Esslin, who coined the term “absurdism”) aims “to shock its audience out of complacency, to bring it face to face with the harsh facts of the human situation as these writers see it…The shedding of easy solutions, of comforting illusions, may be painful [and so] in the last resort, the Theatre of the Absurd does not provoke tears of despair but [rather] laughter.”
This is what I heard Monday night when Adam Lambert sang “She wouldn’t [extended pause] look Jewish [even more extended pause] at all.” I heard an anxious audience express their discomfort the only way they knew how: through that one pressure-release valve we learn as babies. They laughed—not even a real laugh, and by no means a widespread one. A few people chuckled. It lasted about a second.
And then Adam Lambert did something that wasn’t so much breaking the fourth wall as annihilating it. I jotted down the exact words, so to be precise: “The laughing is the problem!” Lambert pleaded with the audience. “Think what you are laughing about!” And then he repeated the line with pauses of even more ridiculous portent between every other word: "She wouldn't..........look Jewish.........................at all."
“That,” I whispered to my friend and fellow theatergoer, the great Frank Falisi, “is the stupidest thing I have ever seen in a play.”
Lambert’s outburst was not without precedent. It came a few months after Joel Grey—the original Emcee himself—published a New York Times editorial expressing dismay at second-hand reports of audience laughter (which he described—again, not having seen it—as the crowd “squeal[ing]”) at the line. The new break in the show first occurred about a month ago, at least as reported in the news coverage of Lambert's fit. A Newsweek article seemed to implicitly laud the actor, quoting other Cabaret viewers who expressed relief and gratitude that he’d called out a line the article repeatedly described as "antisemitic."
I literally just sighed while typing that. It was an involuntary response.
Can we not ask more of ourselves in 2025? Can we not live with the queasy ambiguity induced by a menacing character behaving in the ways the play has taught us he will behave? Can we not be provoked, and have our response to that provocation linger? Can we not fucking live?
It’s very easy for me to spiral into dire philosophizing when I start thinking about Adam Lambert’s fourth wall annihilation. It makes me deeply, deeply sad. The legacy of Hal Prince, who spent years of his life wrestling with the line, is being trampled on by a heavy-booted actor who thinks he knows better than the text how to elicit the “appropriate” response from his crowd. My heart rate spikes when I think about it. It makes me upset in the deepest parts of me.
I have sometimes fancied myself a playwright. It’s a remarkably cool job; unlike a screenwriter, you’re not putting something down to be frozen in amber. You’re creating a living document that can be interpreted and reinterpreted over the years. Unless you’re Edward Albee and want to control your art from beyond the grave, you’re giving it up to the world. There’s something beautiful about that. But it also means a real trust in the world to handle your work with care and dignity.
Apparently not every creator can be so lucky.
When I asked my wife why we can’t have subtlety in our theater, she reminded me: “Half the country voted for Trump.” This, it seems, is the “half the country voted for Trump” Cabaret—it wants to grab us by both ears and yell in our faces, Things are bad! Things are very, very bad! Yet its method of delivering this message is coercive. In Sam Mendes’s staging, Alan Cumming opened the show by asking the audience rhetorically, “Do you feel good?” and then answered himself with a cute little, “I bet you do!”
As with so much of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Lambert amplifies this moment into something I can only call hysterical. “Do you feel good?” Lambert yells at the audience, and when a sufficient reply isn’t forthcoming, he shouts it louder: “Do you feel good?” The audience, badgered into responding, naturally cheers, but the implication is clear: Admit you’re feeling good, you pigs, because we want you to feel bad about it very quickly.
Hal Prince trusted his audience to get the idea. So did Sam Mendes. I have to imagine a lot of directors have trusted their crowd’s intelligence over the years. Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club condescends to its crowd every night of the week except Sunday (but twice on Wednesday and Saturday), and Adam Lambert’s outburst is just the sour icing on this unpleasant cake.
Just over 24 hours before I saw Cabaret at the Kit Kat Ctlub, I had the privilege of seeing the new Broadway revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Blvd. It pulls a lot of the same tricks as Cabaret—a minimalist staging for an aggressive reinterpretation of the material that seems eager to start a provocative conversation with every previous staging—and it’s spectacularly effective. I don’t think I’m overselling it to call the new Sunset Blvd. one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever witnessed in a theater. Broadway revivals are doing fine. I’d just steer clear of the August Wilson Theatre if I were you.