CABARET - welcome to the Kit Kat Club

CABARET - welcome to the Kit Kat Club

Kander and Ebb’s musical 'Cabaret' has to be one of the greatest musicals of all time. Not only does it have some stunning songs and fascinating characters, it has a compelling and highly political storyline with a message from history that cannot be ignored. Set in the decadent Berlin of the early 1930's during the uninhibited era of the Weimar Republic, it sets the rise of the Nazis against the apathy of the masses, and describes a wind of change that would have terrifying consequences for all.
 
ClassAction’s second year Diploma Company staged this epic musical as part of their BTEC studies, and showed explicitly how late Weimar decadence became the soil in which Nazism flourished. Everything about this production reinforced the political message. The multi-leveled set and staging demolished the distinction between the Kit Kat Club and the world outside. The lighting evoked a Berlin swathed in crepuscular gloom, enveloped occasionally with a threatening and foreboding red. And the choreography suggests a society dancing on the edge of an abyss.
 
Cabaret is a deeply political musical, and ClassAction gave it a deeply political and very moving revival at Studio 816 at Godalming College in a sold out run.

“We use our art-form to question the world, and our place within it, and in these crazy times there is a lot of questioning to be done!” Andrew Pullen. Head of Drama “If you take another’s narrative, you have a chance to understand a truth. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth – we all have an obligation to imagine. Individuals make the future and they do it by imagining that things can be different”
 

ClassAction’s production led a smiling audience into a world of horror. When you catch sight of the first swastika it creates a real chill, and it becomes very clear that the party in Berlin is soon to be over.
 
ClassAction offers a rich and varied artistic programme of work for audiences in STUDIO 816 throughout the year. It also offers our audiences the chance to see our young practitioners at the start of their creative journeys whilst they are still training.
 
ClassAction is the performance company at Godalming College. ClassAction aims to produce work that is provoking, entertaining, popular, eclectic, messy, contradictory and diverse. We want to be at the heart of our community here in Godalming as well taking our work out to the wider community. “Made In Godalming”. We want to celebrate the creative power of collaboration as we encourage the next generation of theatre makers to be bold, be rebellious and to make good art – because it matters.