Much like Cliff Bradshaw, author Christopher Isherwood travelled to Berlin 1929 for two reasons: creative inspiration and sexual exploration. In the aftermath of World War I, the newly created Weimar Republic ended censorship, enacted liberal social policies, and had an incredibly attractive currency exchange. This combination attracted scientists, artists, scholars, feminists, and queer people (like Isherwood) from around the world. By the end of the 1920s, Berlin was the cultural capital of the western world--an endless party of exuberant creativity and experimentation.  

 

But the party wasn’t endless.

It ended in the death of more than 11 million. 

 

“How did Hitler happen?” is one of history’s most central questions, and a question we cannot stop asking. How did a country--a world--allow the darkest chapter of our history? How did a society sit blindly while their friends and neighbors were persecuted, tortured, and killed?

 

These are questions that did not end with the second world war and that we continue to grapple with today.  Cabaret puts a thin layer of shine on the persecution of anyone who is an “other" and asks its audience, "What would you do?"

 

Hal Prince, director of the original 1966 production, said of Cabaret: “To us, at least, [Cabaret] was a play about civil rights, the problem of [Black people] in America, about how it can happen here…. the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s.”

 

So welcome to Cabaret! It is Germany in 1930. It is America in 2021. It is then and now; the Kit Kat Klub and the Des Moines Community Playhouse.

 

Here, life can be beautiful.