I only wanted to do the part if it was going to be an authentic look at what it was really like to be alive then, to be a part of a decadent world that ultimately disappeared. I wanted to be dirty and to be shocking, and to look like a drug addict, and to scare people and enchant them at the same time…. I am so glad I did it for so many reasons. It felt great to do something so different and very liberating to be so exposed – literally.
What starts as a parody of a romantic love song ends with a chilling anti-Semitic remark. Seeing their re ections in an enormous mirror hanging on the upstage wall, the patrons slowly realize they have been lured into fascism. Grey’s performance leaves the audience sick.
In 1993, Alan Cumming radically reinterpreted the role of the Emcee. In American Theatre Roger Copeland described Cumming’s portrayal as a “seduction machine who slinks out of a black-leather trench coat and greets the audience in three languages and at least that many sexual orientations. Whatever you want—whatever your fancy or fantasy—this protean, gyrating, omni-sexual creature will ful ll it for you.” Cumming thrusts sex and despair into the spotlight. Tattoos, glitter, and black lipstick replace the white face and red cheeks of Grey. Cumming wears only a black bow tie against his bare chest. Bruises and track marks run up his arms. As he sings “I Don’t Care Much,” he shoots himself up with heroin.
Alan Cumming’s bruised and beaten body replaced Joel Grey’s wide-eyed, satanic puppet. Pain radiated from Cumming’s character work. Critics called Cumming’s Emcee a chameleon. During the song “If you Could See Her,” Cumming dances with a gorilla. Everyone enjoys the shtick. Out of nowhere toxic waste bubbles up to the surface. When Cumming utters the last line, “She doesn’t look Jewish at all,” he hisses it as a threat. According to Sam Mendes, who directed the 1993 London and 1998 Broadway revivals, when Cumming sings that line, “the musical turns into a black-as-pitch play. The audience is a willing
participant in the rst part of the evening, but then the doors lock from the outside and they become prisoners.”
The role of the Emcee has changed with each new production. In a 2003 interview, composer John Kander said, “When Cabaret was first done, it was fresh and imaginative and no one had ever seen anything like it. And in a funny way, that’s what Sam [Mendes] did for a whole other generation: we got back the feeling Cabaret had had the first time out.” It’s been twelve years since the second Broadway revival opened. By casting the Emcee as a woman, played by rock performer Amanda Palmer, the American Repertory Theater will give the Emcee another jolt.
Rachel Hutt is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
