Three and a half decades after the celebrated production by Jerôme Savary with Ute Lemper and Rosel Zech, the new performance in Düsseldorf creates a vital accent - not least with regard to the smoke signals since February 24, 2022, and the European war in Ukraine.

When Josef von Sternberg filmed Heinrich Mann's novel "Professor Unrat" in 1930 in Babelsberg and rose from the drama of authority decay "The Blue Angel", it was said with a smirk that the success of the film stood on the shoulders of Marlene Dietrich. When Jerôme Savary directed the musical "Cabaret" for the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 1986, the success of the piece based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin novel stood on the shoulders of Ute Lemper, who carried it from Münster to New York. However, the new Düsseldorf "Cabaret" stands on a completely different foundation.

Of course, the recent past of 1929/30 returns to the stage here, either sneakily or with full force, but it is not historically behind glass. The uniform worn by the HJ boy when he sings "The Day After Tomorrow is Mine" can also be a glaringly blue outfit, the melody can abruptly change to waltz time and end harshly with the trumpet. In the Kit Kat Club - read backward: Tik Tak - the clocks tick differently. Harder days are coming!

On Ansgar Prüwer's revolving stage, a tattered poster hangs almost inconspicuously among a few props - stairwell, bed, fruit stand, ambulatory like the circumstances. "Vote National Socialists" is written on it, beneath which another appears; two kissing men, perhaps the promotional invitation for "Do it with". This is how the three-hour production by André Kaczmarczyk works: symbolically strong and in the free space of the in-between. In other words: in the irreality of reality. It undertakes its dance steps there.

The impossible love story of the club singer Sally Bowles and the young writer Clifford Bradshaw, into whose character Isherwood wrote himself while he was composing his period novel "Goodbye to Berlin", shifts between Miss Schneider's boarding house and the Kit Kat cabaret. Not so with Kaczmarczyk. The boundaries are open and fluid, there is lively exchange, not only through the MC (also Kaczmarczyk), who flickers as a liminal being, grinning, commenting, peeking, laughing, and predicting, but in general.

The private and the professional condition each other. A single illusion space, no two worlds: the shabby subletter apartment, in which Rosa Enskat as Miss Schneider is a hardship case from need and necessity, and where, at the direction "Light", spotlights come on, and the sinister showroom, they belong together. Artists' fate. In front of the curtain, Sally sings "Maybe this time", behind it a double imitates her.

Boundaries between genders also cannot be fixed. In black leather and lacquer with chains and studs, sexual preferences, self-locations, and self-presentations are not clear-cut. Just as little as is the connection between Sally and Cliff (Belendjwa Peter). She only has to see a mother with a child to become pregnant; for him, a male bed rabbit hops out of the sheets, which the performance does not forget as an excluded third party until the end. Lou Strenger as Sally, with the power of her broken heroism, does not make us think of Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse's film version at all. The trail goes towards Bette Midler, Fanny Girl Barbra Streisand, Irma la Douce, "Pretty Woman" before the corruption by Richard Gere and Truman Capote's Holly Golightly.

Up until the intermission, the musically (Matts Johan Leenders) and choreographically (Bridget Petzold) brilliantly captivating production - especially in the eternally grand songs by Fred Ebb / John Kander - with an ironic gesture teases the erotic as well as the romantic, the material as well as the ideological. It bounces whimsically in "Two Ladies" with false breasts, a penis prop, false blonde hair, and a moustache, puts a Riefenstahl-model athlete on the pedestal, finds a hand grenade in a money safe, or builds a fairy tale image that reminds more of Hans Christian Andersen than of Hans Fallada. It swings us into safety. 

But then! From step to step, only a brief transition. Once again, boundaries fall: between power and powerlessness, training and dominance, giving up and resisting. The darkness weighs painfully, time lurks for what is to come, which is already there. The figure of the little henchman Ernst Ludwig (Raphael Gehrmann) is sharpened into a dangerous party commissioner. The Jewish fruit vendor Jude Schultz (Thomas Wittmann - awkwardly gentle like James Stewart) does not get married, but packs his suitcase; it suffices that a leather man crushes an apple, that the juice sprays. And Kaczmarczyk as MC is Cassandra, ballroom diva, lament queen (“I don’t care”) and death announcer.

The Berlin revue has danced itself out. It’s over. The final song "Life is a Cabaret", which celebrates the 'nevertheless', is a desperate elegy in Düsseldorf. Brutal, rough, dissonant. This is how musical can be - it must be. Everyone is "Lost", as Isherwood originally wanted to call his novel. This production comes close to him.