“Cabaret” Draws on Skill, Subject To Create A “Must-see Performance”

“‘Cabaret’ is, more than anything else, a play of if! If more people had placed themselves between Hitler’s scythe and his victims. If courage always rose to face peril. If we, all of us, now understood that the rousing party before the storm is always as ominous as the calm.”
—Patrick Reynolds

“Cabaret” is set during World War II during the on-going conflict between the German Nazi party and the Jews. The play is a play within a play: it starts off back stage of a cabaret with the characters in a brothel, all of whom are actors and entertainers getting ready for a show. One of the characters suggests that they read through a play, so they choose who will be acting as which character. Throughout the play, it goes back and forth from them acting the characters in the play to the original setting of them in the back of the cabaret.

The play brings the audience into the characters’ lives and shows what they are dealing with at the time. Topics range from falling in love, engagement, marriage, and abortions to arguments about race and nationality. The actors in “Cabaret” excellently reenact people of that time. The end of the play shows the MC turning on the radio, with Hitler on it, wanting everyone to conform.

The actors do an outstanding job of capturing audience attention. A good actor must live the part and not just act it, a difficult task at which all of the actors succeeded. The main characters in the play are as follows: Braydon P. Hoover as Emcee, Steve Kniss as Clifford Bradshaw, Bryan Cunningham as Ernst Ludwig, Kelsey Landes as Fraulein Schneider, Michael Swartzendruber as Herr Schultz, Kelsey Wiebe as Fraulein Kost, Charlotte Wenger as Sally Bowles, Ingrid Johnson and Rachael King as the Kit Kat girls, and Brent P. Anders as the MC.

The opening night was last Thursday, Feb. 14, and the play ran through the weekend. “Cabaret” is also showing this coming weekend, so there is still a chance to catch this must-see event. With a running time of two and a half hours, “Cabaret” makes the audience feel as though they are in a different world, as the cast brings this play to life.