Romance blooms as specter of fascism looms
Performers rehearse for Gavilan College Theater’s production of “Cabaret,” which opens May 3. Photo by Calvin Nuttall
By Calvin Nuttall
Bringing the gritty nightlife of 1930s Berlin to the stage, Gavilan College is preparing to mount its production of the classic musical “Cabaret.”
Opening May 3, the show promises to engage audiences with its blend of fun, flamboyant musical numbers and sober examination of social turmoil in pre-World War II Germany, as the Nazis begin to rise to power and warp the lives of all the varied people living there.
“Cabaret” is the perfect blend of fun and serious to both entertain audiences and make them reflect on real-world society, through the lens of the Kit Kat Klub, a Berlin nightclub, said John Lawton Haehl, Gavilan’s director of theater arts.
“It has great songs. It has really fun, iconic dance numbers. And people love it because it is a great musical in and of itself,” he said. “Theater, I think, is at its most powerful when it entertains and it makes us think. That is the other remarkable power that theater has, to make us think. That is why the Greeks had theater festivals. By retelling old myths, we get new insight into ourselves and our own culture. That is what this play does, in the end.”
Jayda Hage leads the audience through the story as the flamboyant “Emcee” character. Part narrator and part mysterious nightclub host, the Emcee cracks jokes, leads musical numbers, and delivers stinging meta commentary as the story unfolds.
“The Emcee is a very androgynous, flamboyant, and very silly character,” Hage said. “Playing the Emcee is really fun. It’s a lot of acting a damn fool and dancing around.”
Although traditionally a male role, Lawton Haehl was so impressed with the level of female talent in this semester’s group he decided to give the role to Hage.
Photo by Calvin Nuttall
“It’s our own kind of interesting twist on the play as people may know it,” he said. “There is a lot of gender ambiguity at play within that character, and so I think it works equally well having a woman dressed up as a man.”
The show follows the arrival to Berlin of “Clifford Bradshaw,” a young American author portrayed by Juan Gonzalez, in the late 1930s. Nearly destitute and living in a boarding house, Bradshaw soon falls in love with the leading lady and local nightclub chanteuse “Sally Bowles,” played by Grace Zendejas.
“Sally is a complex woman,” she said of her character. “She is very confident on stage, but offstage I believe she is not as confident. She is dealing with a lot of things offstage that she copes with onstage. When she meets Cliff, he changes her perspective on a lot of things that she had never thought before.”
In the background of this budding Berlin romance, however, the looming specter of fascism is beginning to rise. Background characters start to appear on stage wearing armbands bearing swastikas, showing the audience that the Nazi party’s influence is growing in German society. Patrons of the Kit Kat Klub start singing patriotic drinking songs with sinister undertones.
“Sally is not Jewish and has the privilege to be blind to what is going on,” Zendejas said. “Cliff tries to give her some sort of realization, but it’s almost like she doesn’t want to understand what is going on, because she doesn’t want to accept that the world around her is crumbling. She wants to kind of live in this fantasyland that everything is fine, but she can only pretend for so long. When the people around her start suffering, she is forced to face reality.”
Photo by Calvin Nuttall
As the persecution of Jews, Communists, and homosexuals intensifies, the characters’ split loyalties cause their relationships to fracture and force them to make difficult decisions between the people that they love and their own personal safety.
“The show is really fun, but also heart-wrenching and very emotional,” said Caroline Drayton, who plays the role of “Fritzie,” and understudies as Sally Bowles. “It’s cool that I get to be a part of something that feels so important and informative.”
Normally, Gavilan only puts on a musical every other year, Lawton Haehl said. The program showed a production of “Grease” just last year. An influx of vocal talent persuaded him to break this pattern.
“One of the reasons we chose this musical is that we have a ton of very talented female singers in our program right now,” he said. “That talent kind of ebbs and flows in a smaller theater group like ours. Because I had so many majors with strong voices, I thought, ‘I really need to do another musical to showcase them.’”
While “Cabaret” as a risqué show features mature subject matter, the producer and director have made efforts to keep the performance family-friendly, without watering down its message.
“We always think about our audience at Gavilan, and we wanted it to be tasteful,” Lawton Haehl said. “Most of the things in here, most of us won’t bat an eye. Two boys kiss — oh, who cares? But, for example, there are some numbers that were originally more overtly sexy in the nightclub, and we’re trying to make them more suggestive than sleazy.”
To that end, he has carefully coordinated costuming needs for each cast member individually.
“I’m very conscious, especially in this show, of my students’ body image and comfort. I make sure to determine what their comfort level is, and respect it. I really want to be careful, so that my students feel supported.”
As for the student actors, they had only glowing reviews to give regarding Gavilan’s theater program and their mentors.
“It’s so exciting to have resources and people who are educated and knowledgeable allowing us to seep that knowledge into our brains,” Zendejas said. “I am grateful this program has given me a little snippet of everything, and I have kind of been able to find what I really enjoy, and what I need to work on. And, of course, the people. I love performing with Jayda, and I’m so excited we get to do it one last time before we both transfer to universities.”
Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance reporter and columnist.
