Not one, but two of the all-time greats of the musical theater are now playing simultaneously in Tokyo. This is the second visit (the first was in 2001) of the Broadway version of "Cabaret," which won four Tony Awards in 1998 and has just finished a six-year run in New York. There is also a rare revival of the legendary '70s version of "Jesus Christ Superstar" by the legendary Shiki Theatre Company, the company that was almost single-handedly responsible for introducing the genre here in the '70s.
Based on Christopher Isherwood's zeitgeist novel "Goodbye to Berlin," the musical is set in the city in 1929, during the Weimar Republic at a time when the atmosphere was "anything goes" after the old order had lost all its authority after Germany's huge defeat in World War I.
In "Cabaret" we are immediately invited into the dingy demimonde of the Kit Kat Club. There, scantily-clad women and men with their tattoos and tight leather pants from the nightclub's resident regulars perform erotica combined with revolutionary satire in what turns out to be a supremely decadent mix.