Cringe Culture, Queer Culture, and Kit Kats

I don’t know how many of you are theater nerds, but if you are, I‘m sure you’ve heard at least one cabaret song. I’m also sure, if you watched the Tony's however long ago, that you’ve seen the backlash Eddie Redmayne has gotten for being too over the top or making viewers of the Tony Award cringe at how weird so many parts of the song were. I agree, this new adaptation is a very cringy, and very difficult to watch musical at some points. I know this is older news, but it's been nagging at my mind since I saw it. This is my take on it:

 Cabaret is a culturally significant piece, depicting the stark reality of the Kit Kat club and life in 1940‘s Germany. It’s meant to make you uncomfortable; the way they make jokes about a gorilla being unfit to be a partner, making you laugh at the notion that a human could love a creature such as that, only for the quiet, hissed “punchline“ to be that it is actually a Jewish woman. The way they depict an orchestra playing happily at the beginning, only for each and every one to be killed by the Nazi regime in the end, shining a light on their limp bodies as (in some adaptations) there is silence where you expected to hear them playing as jovially as they did in the opening number. It isn’t supposed to make you feel good, you’re supposed to be deeply unsettled by every minute of this show. 

In the time Cabaret was written, queer culture was being formed. To the outside world, this was a deeply unsettling notion, and quite often freaked out the people who followed "normal" culture. Classics like Rocky Horror Picture Show, though seen as a humorous play on culture quickly becoming mainstream now, was unsettling to many at the time, even being put out in midnight theaters after receiving such bad reviews from their normal audience. This movie was produced in 1975, and Cabaret was produced 1966, so before Rocky Horror even made a slight change to the view of queer culture. This musical made people uncomfortable, it made them squirm in their seats and check the time. This was intentional. 

Fast forward to today, the old style of Cabaret is celebrated. A wonderful, beautiful achievement, that this notion of queer culture is no longer cast to the side, but bad for Cabaret itself. It had become a fun, eccentric show to go see with your friends. The music they played being what pop music now mostly sounds like, or having stage direction seen as funny more than gross. This is exactly what the artists at the Tony's didn’t want, and so they changed the stage direction. They changed the actors, and they changed the faces — they made sure at every moment, the audience was cringing. They made sure at every second the audience was watching Eddie Redmayne pull a strange face and sound weird they were fighting to shrink back in their seats. You were meant to be uncomfortable. You were meant to feel an underlying, ever present feeling of discomfort as you watch these characters hide from the Nazi regime.