CABARET in Minneapolis

It was a perfect summer evening on June 27, one of my last before moving away. Everything glowed warm from golden hour light. Too perfect, much too perfect for the heavy weight in the air. Just earlier that day the Supreme Court limited natural citizenship protections and queer education. Two weeks prior State Rep. Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her dog were slain by a political assassin caping as a police officer. And yet, despite all that, there I sat, sipping on a ginger Chu-hai (the first of two), gabbing with a former supervisor. 

Not that Minneapolis has the same edge as Berlin, but the vibrancy of the queer community and the luscious summer weather was itself decadent. It was to me—instrumental. I’ve grown into my queerness in ways I couldn’t have anticipated because of the openness of Minneapolis. Having grown up in the South, I felt like a moral decadent. I felt like I must’ve cheated something. I didn’t have to strategize every word that left my mouth, how I reacted to microaggressions. I could just be. It felt luxurious. Probably because it was.

The Eagle, kitty cornered from where I lounged on the restaurant patio, was blasting Lady Gaga. My former supervisor and I caught up on each other’s lives, gossiped about gay shit, complained about work, and more. Our waiter was queer too—nails were painted, and a rainbow flag pin emblazoned on his chest. Eventually we started talking about the future. Of course we did. I was going to grad school (crazy. Wow. Can’t believe it!), and my mentor had just moved back to Minneapolis. Our waiter, serving our next round of delicious Chu-hai, asked us if we were going to the cabaret? 

“Uh…wait, which one? Either way, the answer is yes.” We clarified where we were headed and how excited we were. First time for both of us, you see. 

Eventually, feeling liqued up and warm, we wished out waiter a happy pride month and walked to the Guthrie to see Cabaret.

While I’ve grown into my queerness, the state of human rights has degraded significantly in the United States over the past decade. And as I grow into myself and see the world clearer, I feel, frankly, like eating my way through the concrete, since, oh let’s say late January. No one cares. Work continues. Political suppression gets worse. No one talks about it. 

Or I should say no one really wants to. Anyone targeted by this administration has always been targeted by this country and are fucking over it, and anyone newly on the chopping block is too deep in their privilege to handle any real discussion about it.

It made watching Cabaret weird. Really weird. Specifically, the audience made it really fucking weird. 

For those who haven’t seen the show, it follows an American writer living in Weimar Berlin trying to find inspiration for his next novel. He frequents the Kit Kat Club, a romping queer burlesque where everyone can leave all of their woes behind because “there are no troubles here.” The show intersperses character drama with diegetic musical numbers ostensibly performed in this club, mediated by a cheeky/sexy/somewhat uncanny fourthwall breaking Emcee. Everyone is lost in their melodrama while they stew in an ever intensifying Nazi Reich. 

I thought the show was brilliant. Consider me obsessed. I loved its bawdiness, its queerness, and there wasn’t a miscast to be had. Mary Kate Moore’s portrayal of Sally Bowles, and her “Cabaret” finale had me leaping out of my seat to cheer. It’s odd to cheer for a woman singing about taking her own life, unable to cope with the political horrors outside the doors of the club. Another one of the brilliant farces of the show. 

For all its dance between the insanity of reality and of escapism, Cabaret was the only thing that captured what life has felt like since the fascist in chief was sworn in. The problems the characters deal with weren’t metaphor—they were real. I remember Herr Schultz and Fräulein Schneider debating whether or not to get married, whether or not they should leave the country even. The former implored that life was too short to wait for happiness. The latter argued that it was all helpless when your time is basically run out anyways. I gasped out loud that I had had that exact same conversation. For the first time, I felt like something captured it, that feeling of watching bigotry sweep through a place you love, and not knowing how you’re going to live with yourself no matter what decision you make, and those responsible for all the madness are much closer to you than you might anticipate. Catharsis like that doesn’t happen often. 

I’m not sure how viscerally the rest of the audience felt that though. After the opening number for Act 2, the Emcee takes the stage to usher in the next scene, making sure to accuse the audience of not taking the situation seriously; “You still think these Nazis are a joke, do you? Do you?” Someone, a young professional woman by the sound of it, interjected back with all the pride of a cheerleader leading the crowd in a row against the opposing team, “yeah they are!” This is also to say nothing of the numerous knowing chuckles during “If You Could See Her,” a number where the Emcee dances with a gorilla on stage pleading the audience to understand and respect their love, revealing that their girlfriend is Jewish.  

It is difficult to state how galling her naivety was in that moment. With the recency of the Hortmans’ assassination, I had assumed that an audience of Minnesotans would be primed to agree with the more urgent messages of the musical. That none of this is a joke, and no amount of us going to the Kit Kat Club was going to make it any less of a joke. Simply put, jokes don’t kill people, and fascists do. The other interpretation of this behavior is that it wasn’t naive at all. What’s the likelihood that this woman was being sarcastic, a wink-wink nudge-nudge that the far-right has used for the past decade in order to acculturate the common public to the obscene? Much higher than it should be. 

Cabaret examines both of these kinds of people through protagonist Cliff and secret Nazi operative Ludwig. Cliff, apathetic to the current politics of Berlin and desperate to make some easy money runs packages between Berlin and Paris for Ludwig. However, when Ludwig later reveals that he’s a Nazi at Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz’s engagement party, the latter of whom is Jewish, Cliff comes face to face with the fact that he has been directly helping the Nazi party. Mind you the woman interjected after this reveal, so the message should have been clear. 

The problem is that naivety often holds hands with fascism. It transforms the overt into covert. Ludwig could not have supported an international chapter of Nazis without Cliff’s help. Cliff at the very least had the moral sense to be disgusted by his own ignorance. I worry that in the real world more people are worried with performing their moral outrage than in actually doing anything good. That is a critical dividing line between self-proclaimed allies and targets. 

And, as anyone who’s seen the show can imagine, that dividing line becomes all the more stark  once the show reaches its end. Because at some point it doesn’t matter how the Emcee “[doesn’t] care much.” At some point there is no more orchestra. There is no more setting politics aside or enduring it. 

Forgive me for thinking that Minnesota, between a failed Democratic bid for president, an assassination that launched a statewide manhunt, and white supremacist ICE agents, would have been more sober for a musical like this. 

I don’t think there’s any fixing this divide. I think there is simply choosing to do good.