CABARET at The Justice Theater Project

Join The Justice Theater Project for our Season Finale with the celebrated musical CABARET, Book by Joe Masteroff, Music by John Kandor, and Lyrics by Fred Ebb at Umstead Park United Church of Christ, from June 7-23, 2024. Winner of eight 1967 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Musical Score by John Kandor and Fred Ebb, Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical - Joel Grey, Best Performance by a Featured Actor Peg Murray, Best Direction of a Musical Harold Prince, Best Choreography Ron Field, Best Scenic Design Boris Aronson, Best Costume Design Elizabeth Zipprodt and nominated for three others.

“Life is a cabaret, ol’ chum, so come to the Cabaret.” In a nightclub set in 1929-1930 Berlin, during the twilight of the Jazz Age, as the Nazis rose to power, the musical focuses on the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub that revolves around American Writer Clifford Bradshaw’s relations with English cabaret performer Sally Bolles. Drawing to a close, a garish Master of Ceremonies welcomes the audience and assures them they will forget all their troubles at the Cabaret. Employing the Emcee's bawdy songs as wry commentary, this musical classic explores the dark, heady, and tumultuous life of Sally Bowles and Berlin's natives and expatriates as Germany slowly yields to the emerging Third Reich. The musical numbers performed by the Emcee revel in the decadence that serves s a metaphor for the political decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party, which in a few years, would be closing down establishments like the Kit Kat Klub and burning “Un-German books in the streets of Berlin.

Addressing the issues in the characters' lives in the late 1920s parallels what we deal with today - racial profiling, inclusiveness, politics, survival, sorrow, and fear because of others in our own lives. CABARET plays with culturally and politically reactionary forces and often follows episodes of significant social change, especially in a progressive direction. Spawning numerous reimagined Broadway revivals, CABARET is among the American theatre’s most enduring musicals.