New Line's 2000-2001 season opened with a jaw-dropping, shake-hands-with-the-devil production of one of the most shocking, most disturbing musicals ever written,

CABARET

The St. Louis Post Dispatch called it "one of the most powerful productions that... New Line Theatre has ever staged." Set amidst the intoxicating sexual freedom of 1930s Berlin just as the Nazis were coming to power, this Tony-winning, Oscar-winning, Grammy-winning musical is as powerful today as ever. Cabaret focuses on the personal, on the lives of ordinary people, and how they were affected by the growing anti-Semitism and the growing paranoia in Germany as Nazi philosophies crept insidiously, almost unnoticed into the national consciousness. We often ask how good people could have allowed the extermination of millions of Jews. Cabaret begins to answer that question, as we see patriotism turn to fanaticism, as we see apathy turn to complicity, as we see tiny prejudices and indignities turn into the seeds of the Holocaust. With the growing conservative mood in America today, Cabaret is a more potent cautionary tale now than ever before, as our own political rhetoric is getting more and more like that of the Nazi party in 1930s Germany.