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Cabaret, set in Weimar Berlin just before the rise of the nazi party follows Cliff, an American who is in search of inspiration. He finds Sally, a performer at the Kit Kat Klub, and through the two of them we see what life was like when the nazis came to power, and how dangerous it can be when one decides to look the other way. Cabaret is a story about love, lust, and ignorance. We see Cliff and Sally ignore the problem at hand in an attempt to find happiness, but the consequences come crashing down hard when the world around them begins to shift.
The goals for lighting in this production were to tell the story of how the world is shifting around Cliff, Sally, and the Kit Kat Klub. I designed a journey from warm inviting tones to cool threats to a final cold harsh awakening. Our production accomplished this through multiple means. First of all, a secondary lowered grid was hung in the space which all light was underneath, in order to create a sense of compression. Then, I added a loss of security by "breaking" the practicals that we had been using to denote location with a flicker. These flickers lead to the final moment of the show - when the Emcee drops their robe to reveal a concentration camp uniform, we filled the theatre with light from fluorescents hung above the secondary grid, which broke the illusion of the space and startled the audience, waking them up from the daze that the show operates in.
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