Jewish singer Adam Lambert, who first rose to fame as the runner-up on “American Idol” in 2009, is in the new production of the hit 1966 musical “Cabaret,” and he’s encountering a problem he didn’t expect — one that, as a Jewish creator, he feels compelled to address: members of the audience laughing at what is meant to be a shocking antisemitic joke in the show’s second act.
For those of you who haven’t seen “Cabaret” (a travesty I recommend remedying!), the musical takes place in a Berlin cabaret venue called the Kit Kat Club during the late 1920s and early ’30s. It’s the twilight of the Jazz Age, as Nazism slowly but surely rears its head in the German capitol, seeping into even this most bohemian of spaces. Meant to serve as a distraction from that dawning darkness, the club is, at the end, not an escape or a safe space at all.
While the play, written by Jewish World War II veteran Joe Masteroff with music by Jewish songwriting duo Kander and Ebb, is, in some ways, a love story between Cliff, an American author living in Berlin (based on Christopher Isherwood) and a cabaret actress named Sally Bowles, the character at the center of the musical is the cabaret’s master of ceremonies, referred to as The Emcee. In the original Broadway show and the cult classic 1972 movie, The Emcee is played by Joel Grey, a Jewish gay man (at the time, Grey, father of “Dirty Dancing” actress Jennifer Grey, wasn’t public about his sexuality). Some might argue that it was Grey’s performance as the sinister character that helped make the play the iconic timeless hit that it is today.
One of the numbers that The Emcee performs is a song called “If You Could Only See Her,” in which he croons a love song to an actor in a gorilla suit. He is in love with said gorilla and wishes the crowd could see her through his eyes. At the end of the song, we realize the song is antisemitic in construct. “If you could see her through my eyes,” he sings, “you couldn’t even tell that she’s a Jew.”
The original “joke,” Grey recalls in a recent op-ed for the New York Times, drew such gasps and indignation from audiences that the producer decided to tamper it — the play was already considered quite salacious and shocking for its time. Instead, Grey sang, “If you could see her through my eyes / She isn’t a meeskite at all,” using the Yiddish word for ugly featured in an earlier song by a Jewish fruit merchant, Herr Schultz. The choice muddled the song’s meaning and impact, and oftentimes, Grey writes, he would conveniently forget to change the lyrics.
In the movie adaptation, which features an unforgettable Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles, the song includes its original Jewish lyric, which draws ominously jovial laughter — it’s a dark, pivotal moment in both the play and the film.
In this new “Cabaret” revival, though, which premiered at the August Wilson Theater last September, that line, once a source of horror, seems to sometimes draw genuine laughter from the audience. And on multiple occasions, Lambert, who was raised Jewish in San Diego, has stopped the play to go off script, not willing to let the casual antisemitism slide. In those instance, he has asked those laughing to pay attention, sometimes repeating the line, emphasizing the point of the scene by repeating those hateful words, and telling those laughing that they’re not made for comedy.
David Rigano, who was at the show earlier this month, wrote about how touched he was to see Lambert stop the play at such a moment in an open letter that has since gone viral.
“This afternoon at Cabaret, as you were finishing the song ‘If You Could See Her’ and you held the gorilla’s face in your hands to say ‘She wouldn’t look Jewish at all,’ you were cut off by people in the audience laughing at the joke,” he shared on social media. “Not nervous laughter, not shocked laughter, but people who found the surprise that it was a Jewish gorilla legitimately funny.”
Rigano went on to write he was “shaking my head that we live in a world that didn’t get the point of that joke.” He then explained how Lambert turned to them and, still in character, said, “No. This is not comedy. Pay attention.”
“Especially the week of this inauguration, I really appreciated that,” Rigano shared. “And from the applause you got for it, I feel like the rest of the audience appreciated it, as well. Thank you so so much.”
Lambert, who has toured with the band Queen and recently released a salacious album worthy of the seediest of cabarets, responded to the post with a sincere thanks, saying how the show feels especially important right now, and how he hopes audiences walk away thinking and feeling “empathy towards how marginalized groups can be scapegoated as political strategy. That’s my hope and motivation every show; to pull you into an irresistible community and then make you miss us as we are stolen from you. Maybe just maybe we can change some minds.”
It’s a laudable move from Lambert — refusing to be complicit in any kind of normalization of bigotry, even from the stage, and a signal to marginalized members of the audience which, I’m sure like any Broadway show, draws many a New York Jew and Jewish tourist. It sends a strong message that he is on their side, that he is standing up for them, that they are in a safe space at the theater, even if, just like in the scenes of “Cabaret,” the world outside is filling with a darkness that’s hard to escape.
So why are people laughing? Is it that they do foster the same antisemitic sentiments that the crowd at that imagined cabaret would have? Is it that they’re drunk and unaware because the show is set in an actual cabaret-like space that encourages drinking and immersing yourself in the experience?
Grey himself has thoughts on this question. “My initial assessment, when word first reached me about this unusual reaction,” he wrote in the New York Times piece, “was that these must be the triumphant laughs of the complicit, suddenly drunk on power and unafraid to let their bigotry be known. Now I find myself considering other hypotheses. Are these the hollow, uneasy laughs of an audience that has retreated into the comfort of irony and detachment? Are these vocalized signals of acceptance? Audible white flags of surrender to the state of things? A collective shrug of indifference?”
The stage star, who also originated the role of the wizard in “Wicked,” concluded that he doens’t know which option feels like the most ominous. He worries that just like the Jews of the ’20s and ’30s, we may feel like the state of things won’t ultimately affect us. It’s also worth noting that when “Cabaret” originally premiered, the Holocaust still felt very near. Only two decades had passed since the liberation of the camps. Maybe the laughter is a sign that we’ve forgotten the very real and harrowing consequences of that line.
“Cabaret” has been on Broadway countless times since 1966, with incredible Emcees — Eddy Redmayne, Neil Patrick Harris, Alan Cummings, Adam Pascal — yet in the over five decades since it has premiered, this is the first time that character is once again played by a queer Jewish actor. The timing feels especially prescient, with rising antisemitism and LGBTQ+ rights in peril.
In a 2023 interview with Ynet ahead of a Tel Aviv concert (he had previously performed with Queen in the country in 2016 and even played “Hava Nagila”), Lambert talked about the rise of antisemitism in the U.S. While he said he hadn’t experienced it personally, “I’m definitely witnessing what’s going on and it’s terrifying. I think that’s part of the issue is that there’s a lot of myths and rumors that are going around and are awful, toxic ideas and they’re not true… We as a people have had a long history of being scapegoated and I think the number one sort of way to combat that is just educating people and sharing with people and visibility is really important. Making sure that people understand that the clichés and stereotypes that some antisemites push around are not true.
“I think it’s beautiful that there are a lot of people in the entertainment industry, for example, that are Jewish and are continuing to make beautiful art and some of that art does sort of directly address that issue,” he continued, not knowing that a little over a year year later he would be working on a project that does just that — and that he would personally stand up against antisemitism in a way that resonates with so many.
