Adam Lambert won’t stand for prejudice at his Kit Kat Club.
Joel Grey, who played “the Emcee” in the original production of “Cabaret” — the same role Lambert’s playing in the current Broadway revival — wrote an essay in the New York Times claiming that there has been a shocking shift recently in the way that the musical’s antisemitic themes play out in the theater.
At the beginning of the third act, the Emcee sings a love song to a gorilla — a moment intended to make a comment about how antisemitism can creep into a society.
At the end of the song, he sings, “If you could see her through my eyes, She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”
“When we first performed it . . . audiences gasped and recoiled,” Grey wrote. “It was too offensive, too raw, too cruel. I’m hearing from friends in the current Broadway production of ‘Cabaret’ that the line is once again getting an audible response, but of a different sort.”
He claimed “on more than one occasion in the past two weeks” a small number of audience members “have squealed with laughter at ‘She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.’ ”
He added, “In the late 1960s . . . the truth was too hard to hear. Today, it seems the line is playing exactly as the Nazi-sympathizing Emcee would have intended.”