Adam Lambert won’t stand for prejudice at his Kit Kat Club.
Joel Grey, who played “the Emcee” in the original production of “Cabaret” — the same role Lambert’s playing in the current Broadway revival — wrote an essay in the New York Times claiming that there has been a shocking shift recently in the way that the musical’s antisemitic themes play out in the theater.
At the beginning of the third act, the Emcee sings a love song to a gorilla — a moment intended to make a comment about how antisemitism can creep into a society.
At the end of the song, he sings, “If you could see her through my eyes, She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
“When we first performed it . . . audiences gasped and recoiled,” Grey wrote. “It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of ‘Cabaret’ that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort.”
He claimed “on more than one occasion in the past two weeks” a small number of audience members “have squealed with laughter at ‘She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.’ ”
He added, “In the late 1960s . . . the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.”
A production source told us that during a recent performance, Lambert “paused and had to ‘stare down’ audience members who laughed inappropriately at the [line].”
“He gave the guy the iciest death stare I’ve ever seen,” a witness said.
Another source who’s seen the show with the Queen singer as the lead told us, “A man next to me laughed at that part. It made my blood run cold, but I reassured myself he was just drunk. Hearing it’s actually become a laugh line — it’s so heartbreaking.”
There has been a huge groundswell in antisemitism worldwide since the terrorist attacks against Israelis in October 2023.
English (US) ·