"Wilkommen, bievenue, welcome..." Those were the initial lyrics to one of the best shows to come out of Broadway, Cabaret. And that song in particular is the one that everyone remembers, mainly because it's such a great way to open a show. Sure, more modern productions turn up the raunchiness a little more, but the opener still retains that classic timelessness. Plus, the song obviously has lyrics in three different languages, which gives it a cool cosmopolitan party feel.
Of course, anyone who knows anything about the plot of the show knows that this party won't last for long. For as you see, the plot revolves a romance between a British cabaret singer and an American author, another romance between a landlady and an old fruit vendor, with a cabaret's MC indirectly commenting on the action all the while. The main thing that matters, of course, is the setting: it is Berlin in the early 1930s, and the Nazis' rise to power is the main overarching storyline of the play. The way the play handles it, however, is what gives it relevance in the modern day.
Yes, I know what you are thinking, dear reader: looking for comparisons between the German goosesteppers and any modern-day political movement is for the realm of the angry YouTube commenter. Because in all honesty, in any other circumstances I would want to avoid such things like the plague. However, we do not live in such a world, especially considering how the current alt-right movement gained much of its support by using xenophobia and exploiting legitimate economic issues. Thus we have a major political campaign whose leadership includes rabid partisan lunatics, bootlicking idiots, and generally bigoted Twitter users.
Thus, you have many people who are like Ernst Ludwig, an otherwise normal man attached to a reprehensible political movement. And one of the show's strong points is that he is portrayed in a way that is generally understandable, but otherwise disheartening. And that thing in Cabaret about the romance between a landlady and an old fruit vendor? As it turns out, the latter is Jewish, and one of the plot points involved an anti-Semitic attack on his shop that was dismissed by the others as nothing special. Of course, there are some similarities to recent incidents, but a better comparison would be how elements of the media treated the aforementioned certain campaign's use of a certain symbol with rhetorical kid gloves. Not to mention the desire to seek out a disenfranchised political punching bag; in Germany itself, there is an article that states, "In the past it was Jews, today it is refugees."
And that is why the musical in general and the finale in particular can still hit a nerve today. It is still essentially "Wilkommen", but with a far more bleak and somber tone. As the song begins, the author writes, "There was a cabaret, and there was a master of ceremonies ... and there was a city called Berlin, in a country called Germany... and it was the end of the world." Meanwhile, the cabaret singer and the MC are insisting everything is fine ("It'll all work itself out" and "We have no troubles here"), the couple are worried about the future, while Ludwig is proclaiming that if they were German, they would understand the new order. And then curtain falls after the MC sings one of the most unnerving bookends in theater history:
"Auf Wiedersehen... à bientôt... good night!"
