By Aliza Billet, Arts and Culture Editor
I love theater. I love the unique and innovative ways theater tells stories of lives outside our own. However, over the years, I’ve also encountered a surprising amount of Jewish-adjacent productions, which I also appreciate for hitting closer to home. I especially love being a single audience member in the greater whole of a crowd at those shows, because the experience varies vastly, depending on the show and context in which it is being performed.
The most uniquely Jewish experience I’ve had was as an audience member of Fiddler on the Roof in Hebrew at the Jerusalem Theater in Israel. It wasn’t the Hebrew translation or the fact that the show is simply about Jews that made the experience so unique; it was the way the reactions of the audience, made up of mostly observant Jews, differed from other, more secular Fiddler audiences I have been a part of.
Fiddler on the Roof follows Tevye the Dairyman, a simple shtetl Jew in early 1900s Russia, as one by one, his daughters increasingly challenge his traditions through their marriage choices. It is an endearing and powerful story about balancing traditional and family values and it speaks to audiences of all demographics – as proven by the various awards it has won since its conception in 1964.
However, seeing Fiddler on the Roof as part of a majority-frum audience made it clear that the show hits closer to home for Jews, especially religious ones. Throughout the show, Tevye makes biblical references, some of which are humorously incorrect. In a “normal” audience, some people will chuckle because they understand the allusion. For this Jerusalem-based audience, though, everyone got the references, like inside jokes we all understood. The laughter was tangible.
Towards the end of the show, Tevye’s third daughter, Chava, informs him that she will be marrying a non-Jew. Generally, during this moment, the audience waits with bated breath to see if Tevye will give in, like he did with his two older daughters who made unconventional (albeit still Jewish) marriage choices. However, the dati audience in Jerusalem laughed at Chava’s declaration because, like Tevye, they recognized the absurdity of her earnest seriousness. In that moment, I realized that we weren’t just another audience watching a dramatic moment unfold; we understood the characters on a deeper level because in a sense, they were us. It was an underrated moment of Jewish unity.
Another Jewish-adjacent show I can point to as a unique audience experience was my favorite of the shows I saw last year, Harmony. Harmony tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a German singing group that was world-famous in the 1930s. The musical exists to explain why they have been largely forgotten by the world: a few of the Harmonists were Jewish, so the Nazis worked diligently to destroy all records of their existence.
In the wake of Oct. 7, I developed a bit of a Harmony addiction, ultimately seeing the show seven times by the time it closed in February. My motivation for attending performances with such frequency was a little masochistic; I felt the need to seek out a space where I could wallow in Jewish pain that was a step removed from the too-real current state of our world. However, an equally large part of the allure was a feeling of solidarity I felt with fellow audience members. In a time when my day-to-day life was filled with headlines and protests against my people’s existence, here was this art-filled space I could retreat into where I didn’t need to worry about being a Jew, where women in the bathroom complimented my “Bring Them Home Now” dog tag and where I could laugh with fellow audience members at jokes that were uniquely Jewish.
Alas, Harmony closed last year, and I lost that particular Jewish-musical outlet. However, at the end of September, my friend offered me a ticket to Cabaret. I knew Cabaret was also set in 1930s Germany and there was at least one Jew featured, so I jumped at the opportunity.
Cabaret follows American writer Clifford Bradshaw visiting Berlin. He strikes up a relationship with cabaret performer Sally Bowles while his German landlady, Fraulein Schneider, begins her own relationship with the Jewish Herr Schultz, but the rise of Nazism means trouble for that couple. Going into Cabaret with no background knowledge except for its setting and the fact that Nazis would appear, I expected my reaction to it to be similar to that of Harmony, but that could not have been further from the case. The reason for that came from one thing: the audience.
Firstly, where the audience of Harmony always contained enough kippot that I had a pre-show ritual to scan through the crowd and find them all, my friend and I did not see a single kippah in the audience at Cabaret, despite the Jewish themes we knew were coming. This wasn’t a surprise; Cabaret is set partly in a seedy cabaret spot, the Kit Kat Club, and features an array of performers dressed and dancing suggestively. Obviously there are Orthodox Jewish men who attend performances, but they are few and far between, so I was not surprised by the lack of kippot in the audience. However, I was surprised by the lack of reverence I felt the audience paid the story, given its heavy subject matter.
Part of this is definitely by design; Cabaret thrives off drawing the audience into a false sense of security before basically slapping them in the face with Nazis. The staging of this revival in particular further blurs the lines between reality by being staged “in the round,” meaning that the audience sits 360 degrees around the stage, as if they are actually patrons of the Kit Kat Club. But the biggest strength of Cabaret in terms of conveying its message comes through the pervading transformation of the narrator character, the Emcee, who begins the show as an exaggerated caricature of a creepy entertainer, but progressively becomes more “normal” as the show unfolds. This transformation represents the way the German people conformed to the rise of Nazism until they were all complicit even as bystanders and prompts the audience to look in the mirror and realize how easy it would be to fall prey to a similar situation.
As a Jew, witnessing the audience falling into the trap of complicity made my experience at Cabaret far from the comforting and unifying one I so appreciated at Harmony. Case in point: the song “If You Could See Her.” Fraulein Schneider breaks off her engagement to Herr Schultz because she discovers he is Jewish. Shortly afterwards, the Emcee performs a choreographed number with a gorilla, cryptically comparing it to a Jewish woman, until he explicitly states, “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” As Jewish women, my friend and I sat there, literally holding each other in horror, because we understood immediately that it was us the Emcee was calling subhuman. When the song finally ended after what felt like much longer than its three-minute runtime, we were shocked to hear multiple people laughing at the final line. Maybe it was nervous laughter, but the fact the line was necessary to explain the song, and the fact that people laughed at the explanation, was frightening.
Other uncomfortable moments of audience irreverence at Cabaret included the few times in which audience members inappropriately wolf-whistled at the cabaret performers. Not only is wolf-whistling at people objectifying, it was particularly inappropriate at Cabaret, a show which exists to demonstrate the depravity of Nazi Germany, not for the personal satisfaction of the audience members. However, the tangible gasp and ensuing silence which emanated from the audience after a swastika armband was flashed and a character revealed to be a Nazi…
In that moment, I realized that despite the negative things I felt about the audience, the show was achieving its goal.
Until I saw Cabaret, I was under the impression that Jewish-adjacent theater was for the Jews. But by attracting an audience that can be lured in under the guise of a fun night out at the Cabaret – the Emcee literally opens the show by saying, “Leave your troubles outside . . . Here life is wonderful!” – and then ultimately slapping them in the face with antisemitism, Cabaret serves to educate the uneducated about how quickly they might become part of the problem. So while I know I won’t be returning to see it six more times, perhaps there are those out there who can benefit from doing so.
Photo Caption: Fiddler on the Roof in Hebrew at the Jerusalem Theater in Israel
Photo Credit: Aliza Billet