is hurled through Schultz’s window the day after he is recog-
nized as Jewish), the Emcee does a vaudeville turn with a go-
rilla, concluding with his notoriously ambiguous “if you could
see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”^6
Hal Prince’s staging of Cabaretin the original production of
1966 had an area of the stage for what Prince called “Limbo”
scenes.^7 The Emcee stood there more often than anyone. The
ending of act 1 had him on the spiral staircase in the Limbo
area, watching the partygoers at the celebration for Fraulein
Schneider and Herr Schultz become caught up in singing the
Nazi anthem, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.” The Emcee de-
scended, and crossed the stage, still in the Limbo area, while the
figures on stage froze against a black background. The Emcee
was looking at them. He knew this would happen. “Then he
turns to the audience,” reads the stage direction. “He shrugs,
he smiles, and exits.”^8 He is bearing witness to the rise of
Nazism, but this is nothing special to an Emcee in a cabaret,
who is also the welcoming figure for the audience in the the-
atre, us.
Sondheim’s Assassinshas a Balladeer who can attain omnis-
cience from time to time, as when he narrates the assassination
of McKinley (scene 8). But Sondheim is experimenting with
the narrative problem. Later, when the Balladeer enters into
Guiteau’s cakewalk up the scaffold steps, playing banjo while
the two blend into a duet, “Look on the Bright Side,” he gains
in effectiveness because he now is joining Guiteau’s song. He
has abandoned his privileged position of knowing everything
and has entered into song and dance, for a change.
154 CHAPTER SEVEN
(^6) The ambiguity of the Emcee is to the fore here. Perhaps his line is a satir-
ical hit at the Nazis who think so foolishly, but in calling the gorilla Jewish, the
line might speak for anti-Semitism after all. For a fuller discussion of this
show, see Mizejewski, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Mak-
ing ofSally Bowles, and Garebian, The Making ofCabaret. Useful briefer dis-
cussions are in Scott Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story,”chapter 2;
Mordden, Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s, chapter 9;
and Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity,
pp. 239–48.
(^7) Hal Prince, Contradictions, pp. 130–33.
(^8) Cabaretlibretto, p. 84.