“Cabaret” is a musical set in Bohemian Berlin in the early 1930s as the emerging Third Reich begins to slowly take over Germany.
Originally created in 1966, the Broadway production had music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and book by Joe Masteroff. “Cabaret” is based on the 1951 play “I Am a Camera” by John Van Druten, which was adapted from the 1939 semi-autobiographical novel “Goodbye to Berlin” by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood.
According to the Colorado Mesa University (CMU) Performing Arts ticket box, it is set primarily in the seedy Kit Kat Club, an omniscient and gender-bending Master of Ceremonies encourages his audience to forget their troubles.
“Cabaret” is the first live performance for the CMU theater department of the spring semester. Although Robinson Theatre can hold 600 people, under COVID rules only 150 people will be allowed inside.
“They’re all going to be heavily distanced from each other, nobody in the first three rows and wearing masks. So, that is an enormous part of what we do, and we’re making sure that our HVAC system is circulating the air,” Director of “Cabaret” Jessica Jackson said.
With the pandemic ongoing, safety during this time is paramount. With COVID precautions still in place, the theater department changed the way live performances are held.
“When we were testing a lot of concepts last semester about how to do live theater in a pandemic, we ended up having pretty good results in terms of keeping everybody safe. So we’re duplicating it here but because ‘Cabaret’ is a much larger cast size, we thought well what if we create a set that sort of intensifies the social distancing meaning it literally puts walls in between each of the performers,” Jackson said. “So they’re dancing in these boxes, they’re climbing all over them, they’re hanging from bars at the top of the boxes. They play love scenes in these boxes they have. There’s a fistfight, and nobody ever actually touches you or touches each other. We tried to find a kind of a creative way to do cabaret, that was also going to be really visually interesting.”
“Cabaret” opens in the Robinson Theatre inside the Moss Performing Arts Center on Thursday, March 4 at 7:30 p.m. with ongoing performances through March 13. Tickets can be purchased online through the CMU Performing Arts ticket office. Tickets are free for CMU students, $22 for adults and $8 for youths.
