I starred in 'Cabaret;' we need to heed its warning

The New York Times This past week marked the 58th anniversary of the opening night of the 1966 Broadway premiere of "Cabaret."

- By JOEL GREY

At the time, the country was in deep turmoil. Overseas, the Vietnam War was escalating, and at home, our most regressive forces were counterpunching against the progress demanded by the civil rights movement. The composer John Kander, the lyricist Fred Ebb and the playwright Joe Masteroff wrote "Cabaret" in collaboration with the director Harold Prince as a response to the era.

The parallels between the rise of fascism in 1930s Berlin as depicted in the show and the mounting tensions of the 1960s in America were both obvious and ominous.

I played the Emcee - the Kit Kat Club's master of distraction, keeping Berlin mesmerized while Nazism slipped in through the back door. Night after night, I witnessed audiences grappling with the raw, unsettling reflection that "Cabaret" held up to them. Some material was simply too much for the audience to handle. "If You Could See Her," which has the Emcee singing of his love for a gorilla - a thinly veiled commentary on antisemitic attitudes - ended with the lyric: "If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn't look Jewish at all."

When we first performed it, in Boston, audiences gasped and recoiled. It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. Producers fretted and the line was changed to "She isn't a meeskite at all," softening the blow, yes, but also the impact. I resented the change and would often, to the chagrin of stage management, "forget" to make the swap throughout that pre-Broadway run.

Much has changed since the show debuted on Broadway in 1966, but it's what hasn't changed that should worry us.