Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome: between February 26 and March 1, 2026, the Charlotte Latin Theater Arts Department invites you to attend the Upper School Musical, Cabaret. The acclaimed show opened on Broadway in 1966 and has been revived numerous times, with its various productions receiving 13 Tonys. The Charlotte Latin production, staged by Director of Theater Arts Matt Cosper, will transform Anne’s Black Box into the Kit Kat Club, a nightclub in Berlin, Germany, circa 1929-30. We recently sat down for a conversation with him about what’s thrilling and difficult about the show — and the careful choices the creative team is making to stage it at Charlotte Latin.

For people who are unfamiliar with it, what is Cabaret?

Cabaret is a musical based on a collection of stories by Christopher Isherwood, an American writer, which have been collected under various names, including Goodbye to Berlin. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was traveling through Europe. He spent time in Berlin and he wrote about what he experienced there — some of it was his personal experiences of nightlife and love triangles, but he was also a keen observer of the social collapse that allowed Nazism to take hold. 

His book was adapted into a stage play, I Am a Camera, and then into a musical, Cabaret, with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a script by Joe Masteroff. The musical focuses on three characters from his stories: the protagonist Cliff, who is a stand-in for Isherwood; Sally Bowles, a young woman of indeterminate origin who is a nightclub singer of questionable talent but unquestionable charisma; and the Emcee, who is the ringmaster at the Kit Kat Club, a nightclub where people are coming to hide from the outside world.

The musical does a really good job of allowing us to enjoy the dark glamour of the club and to get pulled into that escapism, while gradually showing us the uglier side of it. These characters are in varying levels of denial about how curdled the national spirit of Germany has become and what the country is turning into. The play ends before the Reichstag fire, but it looks ahead to the horrors that are going to unfold with the Nazis.

Why did you want to produce Cabaret now?

All of us — students, parents, anyone awake in the world today — are carrying a lot of anxiety about what lies ahead. Not just in the United States: there’s global concern about the economy, strange weather, and the role that previously unimaginable technology plays in our world. I don’t have a particular political ax to grind, but I worry about all of us, myself included, picking the head-in-the-sand option. There are so many avenues we can use to escape the world and ignore some really scary stuff, but one of our Core Values at Charlotte Latin is Moral Courage. If art can do anything, it can at least say “Let’s look at this.” We try to do a broad spectrum of work with our students in the Theater Arts Department, from fluffy entertainment to classical tragedy. Cabaret is one of those unicorn shows that manages to be incredibly entertaining and a really effective work of art.

Given its mature themes, how are you approaching staging this show with teenage performers?

Over the past six decades, there’s been multiple stage versions of Cabaret, plus the movie directed by Bob Fosse in 1972. Those productions have had a wide range of approaches to human sexuality, leaning into or away from the explicit. The first version of the show I ever saw was the 1990s Broadway revival starring Alan Cumming, which made some particularly lurid choices in the staging. 

You can’t escape a libidinal element in this show, but we’re making choices that will make it age-appropriate for a cast of high school students: saucy but not risqué. After we announced the show, some students asked me if they would be dancing around in their underwear. I told them absolutely not: this production is about the creative response to social upheaval and people who desperately try to ignore the unfolding of a historical horror. For inspiration, we’re drawing more from the expressionist art movement and the Cabaret Voltaire of Dada artist Hugo Ball. Emily Hunter, our choreographer, and I keep talking about staging dance numbers as demented puppet shows, because that fits the aesthetic of the time. If we’re talking about a society falling into totalitarianism, who’s pulling the strings of these puppets?

The other big element with the show is that although the script happens nearly a decade before the concentration camps, when you’re talking about Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, you’re engaging with the specter of one of the great crimes in history. Handling that respectfully has been at the forefront of my mind. We know that there are some students who, for different reasons, will have roles in the show that they want nothing to do with. We’re building a structure into the audition process that will allow them to opt out of specific things. If a student doesn’t want to play a Nazi or an antisemite, they’re not going to do it. If a student isn’t comfortable playing a character who uses their sexuality to get ahead, they’re not going to do it. When students and their parents sign a commitment form for the show after auditions, that’s also a moment when families can discuss the material. I’ve told the students that it’s okay if this show isn’t for them. But for all the students working on the show, we’re going to support them and take care of them.

How will Cabaret affect the Upper School students who aren’t performing in it?

We have a responsibility to the larger community. If we’re the theater company for the tiny city that is Charlotte Latin School, we’re doing the necessary work to connect our student-citizens with the show. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time we’ve created programming outside the theater for students to help contextualize the play. There will be an advisory session the week before the performance to provide some context. We’re planning to do a daytime performance of the show for the entire 11th grade. And then the week after, we’ll have a follow-up session to unpack and process what they saw. 

We’re also looking to partner with the History Department, and groups in the larger Charlotte community. I find that really exciting: we’re making sure that the Theater Arts Department plugs into the larger life and mission of the school.

Last spring, I started seriously talking about the show with Alicia Long [Director of Performing Arts], discussing what the obstacles might be and how to address them thoughtfully. That led me to have conversations with Dr. Sonja Taylor [Associate Head of School] and Chuck Baldecchi [Head of School], saying “I think we can do this if we do it the right way.” They were both really enthusiastic about it — Dr. Taylor immediately had suggestions about the advisory aspect. It was inspiring to collaborate with lifelong educators on how to make these plays accessible to the Latin community. 

What drew you to Cabaret in the first place?

In high school, I was really lucky to take a class called Facing History and Ourselves with Jackie Fishman, whose mother was an Auschwitz survivor and scholar. That class brought me online ethically as a teenage boy — I was so fascinated by it, I took it a second time for no credit. Part of the reason I’m doing this production is because that class made it crystal clear for me that ignoring horror doesn’t make it go away.

Anne Carson wrote, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” I want our performers and audience members to wrestle with difficult material because it reflects the reality of the human condition. We can also do The Drowsy Chaperone and in the next few years, we’ll likely do another Disney musical — that end of the theatrical spectrum is also important. But at a school that’s committed to excellence and moral courage and preparing students to lead lives of purpose, we should reflect those values in our theater department.