Column: Come Gather ‘Round People

I have trouble watching Cabaret, the 1966 musical that choreographer Bob Fosse would direct in an Academy Award-winning film 1972. It’s a scary work of art.  Cabaret is set in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic in 1931, a city and time at the height of a joie d’vivre during a wave of liberal attitudes; resplendent with what we might think of as libertine or even Pagan approach to life and sex. The film opens with the catchy song Wilkommen by the carnivalesque master of ceremonies singing:
Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!