While most of this is just writing to write, there is a point I'd like some artistic feedback on, if so inclined.

So, I caught NachtKabarett this weekend. It was pretty weak, but it's interesting to me to post-mortem it, as the notion of a cabaret/variety show is one that I greatly like the idea of doing.

The theme was a reduplication of a late Weimar/early Reich underground cabaret. Yep, pretty obvious. This lead to what I felt was one of the biggest problems, and one that has one of the more interesting solutions.

It is difficult to communicate a sense of urgency or threat. You can talk about it all you want, you can have the show shutting down whenever the sounds of stormtroopers come in from the outside, but even the cheap fourth-wall stuff (which, thankfully, didn't happen in this production) doesn't make it feel anything. There's neither the sense of a need to burn off repression in ecstatic fervor, nor is there any sense of actual threat or danger about the show. It seems like a show, and you can tell that they're trying to tell you about it.

Likewise, anything like this is going to be befuddled by that sort of weird inconsistency between the English and the fake German, the need to reproduce a scene and the need to use that scene to make some sort of commentary. What you want is to stay true to the source material, but you also want to make the thing somehow relevant and real. This is one of those "serve two masters" sorts of things. This is, perhaps, my number one theatrical pet peeve. You have to trust your audience. You have to believe that they will see what you want them to see, and to go on doing your thing. Too many playwrights don't, and too many plays dive because when the obvious has to be made more so.

This leads to my weird thought. That sense of danger, it's virtually impossible to capture. So you have to imagine that you can only do it by making it very real in some sort of way. And, again, I think that the fourth-wall sorts of things are a) generally uncalled for, b) would need to be far too excessive to work right, c) feel a somewhat dishonest way of doing it, and, frankly, d) are pretty well tired ideas by this point. But for real relevance, you need something like that. And you want something like that. You want to make modern commentary. You want to make jokes about what's going on now.

So, here's the really risky version. Why not go alterative present? It's now, but a way darker version of now. You know, not just suspension of habeas corpus, but the Bill of Rights in general. 2001 led to not only a bad situation, but an overtly fascist U.S. government, but otherwise, as much as possible, the rest of history intact. The trick would be to work this without excessive silliness, or at least without losing all credibility. But, seriously, as bad as the situation with personal rights has been, it's well within imagining. And, yes, that's what I'm interested to hear some feedback on.

In a show like this, you need to cats to type. I'm pretty sure they got who they could, or got their friends together to do a show. The actors had some good improve credits. But good casting is even more essential in something like cabaret. So much of the humor relies upon type to play the jokes. Heck, so much of the show relies upon type. Type provides the shorthand to make the humor quick and easy. It is Commedia. The fact there are typical and obvious jokes make the topical and saucy ones easier to get to.

Unfortunately, the production didn't manage this very well. To wit, there was, quite possibly, the least credible ingénue I have ever seen. Seriously, the diva and the ingenue should have traded places and it would have worked a lot better.

Finally, I almost winced at the first joke, not because it was bad, but because I could tell with how it flirted with anti-Semitism, it was going to pull punches. That really doesn't work, especially in something as dark as cabaret should be. Cabaret is mean. It's the meanest of the various variety programing. It's laden with contempt at everything, but that contempt needs to be internal as well as external. First, there was no means enough cruelty, and that there was, wasn't particularly believable. Second, they weren't really willing to be completely offensive. Without that, it, again, doesn’t have any particular believability.

It's a somewhat jumbled pile of commentary, but I don't want to be reading about taxes.