Adam Lambert on Playing the Emcee in Broadway’s ‘Cabaret,’ and Why Its Anti-Fascist Themes Hit Even Harder Now Than When He Began the Run: ‘It’s Wild, How Relevant It Is’

variety.com:

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Adam Lambert is currently living out a dream, playing the role of the Emcee in the current Broadway run of “Cabaret,” or, as it’s officially known in this production, “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.” That extended titling reflects just how immersive the club-like transformation of the August Wilson Theatre is meant to be, with Lambert as host to an intimate, in-the-round audience in his first leading role on Broadway, every bit as impishly sensual — or should it be sensually impish? — as you’d expect in the iconic part.

But there’s also a bit of nightmare to this dream… not in how it’s working out for Lambert, who has scored wide plaudits for his take on the Emcee, but in the nature of the show itself, which is only light-spirited up to a very finite point.

For all the theatrical delights it offers, this “Cabaret” hardly holds back on the darker, anti-fascist themes that were first introduced in the 1966 musical drama, which takes place in pre-WWII Berlin, with the rise of Naziism forcing some of the characters to make hard choices.

Few who enter this Kit Kat Club will leave without thinking a little or a lot about real-life worries they’ve brought in from the outside the theater.