Preview
Identifier
Revue Program_Page_25
Creation Date
4-23-2021
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Theatre and Performance Studies
Description
DRAMATURGY - “IF YOU COULD SEE HER”
“If You Could See Her” is a song from the musical Cabaret which premiered on Broadway in 1966. With music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and book by Joe Masteroff, Cabaret is based on the 1951 play, I am a Camera which was adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin written by Christopher Isherwood.
Cabaret is set in 1929-1930 in Berlin during the waning days of the Weimar Republic as the Nazis ascended to power. The musical focuses around a club known as the Kit Kat Klub, which is a metaphor for the ominous political developments in late Weimar, Germany. Most of the songs in the show were sung at the Kit Kat Klub, showing two sides of the same world, the performance side, full of music and laughter and fun, and the reality side, filled with war, bigotry and genocide.
The song, “If You Could See Her,” is sung in Act II by the Emcee, “Master of Ceremonies” at the Kit Kat Klub, who is dancing with an actor in a gorilla costume. The gorilla costume is representing Nazi ideology that the Jewish race is no better than animals. The song is asking the audience to see the girl the way that the Emcee sees her, “clever, smart and virtuous.” If they could just look past the exterior then, “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all,” which is the final line in the song.
According to Joe Masteroff, Cabaret was not an instant success when it first premiered on Broadway because of its perceived sexual immoral content. Masteroff stated that several people walked out of the first show but once the reviews came out praising Cabaret the public came back to give it another shot. The show ended up being a box office hit and it ran for 1,165 performances and won 4 tony awards. The musical inspired several subsequent productions in London and New York as well as a 1972 film starring Liza Minnelli, and the original Broadway Emcee, Joel Gray.
Publisher
Arkansas State University
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Theatre Program
Keywords
musical, compliation, retrospective, medley
