By Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
The Ghetto Cabaret ★★★★
fortyfivedownstairs and Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, until August 18
A cabaret set amid the horror and deprivation of Jewish ghettoes in World War II? You’d have to be crazy. Totally meshugah. Yet Galit Klas has created one of the most ambitious and stirring, blackly funny and profoundly sad works of cabaret I’ve seen.
She has some astonishing source material to draw upon. Sung in Yiddish and English, the songs in The Ghetto Cabaret proceed from the indomitable Jewish artists who continued to write poetry, compose music and mount theatrical performances even in the shadow of genocide.
One brilliant aspect of the show is how deeply, under Gary Abrahams’ direction, it links the strengths of cabaret – that irreverent, all-inclusive, seat-of-the-pants quality of variety entertainment – to the desperate circumstances of ghetto performers.
