Michael Wex’s “The Last Night at the Cabaret Yitesh”

Overview

Cabaret meets The Producers in this uproariously edgy new show from the New York Times best-selling author Michael Wex. It’s March 15, 1938, and the censor’s office has just advised the performers in Warsaw’s Yiddish-language “Cabaret Yitesh” that tonight’s show will be their last. With visas to leave the country and nothing left to lose, the performers decide to present material that the censors had already forbidden, along with the cabaret’s greatest hits and most famous skits. Mixing controversial material with cabaret songs from the ’30s, original comedy sketches, Yiddish adaptations of international hits and vaudeville classics, Wex is poignantly funny, often shocking, but always surprising. Expect to see rabbis and drag queens, Brunnhilde’s in dirndls and at least one highly politicized hooker knit together by Wex’s acid-tongued MC. The cast features Shane Baker, Daniel Kahn, Sveta Kundish and Sasha Lurje, with musical direction by Patrick Farrell. In Yiddish with supertitles in English.