right this way, your table's waiting

 

reader comment:

~~ It is the emcee, so flawlessly played by Joel Grey, who delivers Cabaret's catharsis.  

While in the opening scenes of the film Nazi officials were pushed out of the Kit Kat Club as unruly, in the last scene they occupy every seat in the audience.  

Their faces are distorted in the mirrors like grotesque gargoyles.  

Tomorrow belongs to them.  

        The emcee understands that the era of relative liberty has come to an end.  All he can do now is to gracefully bow out.  The spotlight of history is now trained on an entirely different performance.

The relevance of Fosse's Cabaret is eerily current today, with Europe yet again facing a renegade leader with a homicidal agenda.  We need to draw the curtain on that threat, pronto.

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you tube video

title:  Cabaret, Liza Minnelli

uploader:  Felipe Ruiz de Chávez

and Play!

♫♫ ♪

What good is sitting

Alone in your room?

Come hear the music play

Life is a cabaret, old chum

Come to the cabaret

Put down the knitting

The book and the broom

It's time for a holiday

Life is a cabaret, old chum

Come to the cabaret

Come taste the wine

Come hear the band

Come blow your horn

Start celebrating

Right this way your table's waiting

What good's permitting

Some prophet of doom

To wipe every smile away?

Life is a cabaret, old chum

So come to the cabaret

I used to have this girlfriend known as Elsie

With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea

She wasn't what you'd call a blushing flower

As a matter of fact she rented by the hour

The day she died the neighbors came to snicker

Well, that's what comes from too much pills and liquor

But when I saw her laid out like a queen

She was the happiest corpse I'd ever seen

I think of Elsie to this very day

I remember how she'd turn to me and say

"What good is sitting

All alone in your room?

Come, hear the music play

Life is a cabaret, old chum

Come to the cabaret"

And as for me -- hah!

And as for me --

I made my mind up back in Chelsea

When I go... I'm goin' like Elsie...

Start by admitting

From cradle to tomb

It isn't that long a stay

Life is a cabaret, old chum

It's only a cabaret, old chum

And I love - a - ca - ba - ret!!!

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