cabaret, a metaphor for Nazism on the rise, and then leave it
behind as though one were free of the experience. We have
been in the cabaret too, watching a show. There is ambiguity
for us too. Remember the mirror. Cliff fades into a blackout,
leaving us face to face with the Emcee, a reminder that we have
been assuming, as Cliff did, that watching a cabaret is diverting
and nonpolitical. The cabaret reappears, there is a last rendition
of the “Cabaret” number by Sally Bowles, we are back in the
setting of the show, and suddenly there is nothing but the mir-
ror, which swings into position so that we can see ourselves
looking at the cabaret set. There is nothing to look at except a
neon sign saying “Cabaret” and the mirror—and the reflection
of ourselves, looking. Sally Bowles is gone. Cliff is gone. So is
the ambiguous Emcee. But we are still at the cabaret. It is an
unpleasant ending, for we are meant to recognize that our own
attendance at the cabaret has the same political implications
Cliff discovered, and we had thought it was just show business.^16
My other example is from the ending of act 1 in Pacific Over-
tures, where the disjunction between book and number is car-
ried to such a lovely point that no one can say what is happen-
ing in the book. The number is “Someone in a Tree,” which
Sondheim says he is proudest to have written of all his songs,^17
and it comes at a crucial turn in the book, or what would be
acrucial turn if we could see the scene. But we cannot see it.
We hear the performance of the song instead, and the song is
about the inability of anyone to say what is happening in the
plot. The number also divides a character into a younger and
an older self, demonstrating the double order of time that
numbers always bring into this kind of drama.
The book scene is taking place in the Treaty Hut that the
Japanese have built for the first visit of Admiral Perry and his
cohorts, who have insisted on landing and forging a trade agree-
ment with Japan. Intent on keeping foreign feet from touching
202 CHAPTER EIGHT
(^16) Again, I am following the original staging of 1966, which was Hal
Prince’s work. In Sam Mendes’s long-running production of the 1990s, the au-
dience was left face-to-face with a representation of a Nazi gas chamber.
(^17) Quoted in Secrest, Sondheim, p. 281.