"Welcome, bienvenue, welcome." This is the cosmopolitan way the emcee greets the audience at the Kit Kat Club every evening. Clifford Bradshaw is also one of the many guests who throw themselves into the nightlife, into the world of cabarets and travesty shows, into the variety of possible lifestyles, the promise of an alternative lifestyle - an intoxicating exploration of free spaces.
But the days are less glamorous: in the city's boarding houses, people live in close quarters with strangers, and it is not easy to pay the rent every week. The dance takes place on the proverbial volcano - behind the glittering façade lies a torn society; material misery meets a national soul that delights in being offended.
At the Kit Kat Club, Clifford meets the singer Sally Bowles - a collision that leads to an amour fou between lived libertinage and a longing for an orderly life. The story of the two unfolds in the midst of a social maelstrom that sweeps the precarious existences along with it, into a new era that for some represents a promise of advancement, for others certain doom. The glitter fades, and those who can save themselves from what seems inevitable - including Clifford, who flees back to America via Paris.
Clifford Bradshaw is the alter ego of Christopher Isherwood. The English writer lived in Berlin at the end of the 1920s - then, as now, one of the metropolises that stood for diverse models of life and relationships. Isherwood experienced up close the upheaval, the shattering of life's dreams. In the 1930s, the novels "Mr Norris Changes Trains" and "Goodbye to Berlin" were published, which inspired one of the most glamorous titles in musical history, a cry of joie de vivre: CABARET!
Premiere September 29, 2023
Further performances: October 19 and 28, November 17, December 7 and 31, 2023, January 27, February 3 and 4, March 13, April 13 and 14 and May 12, 2024
