I have been head over heels in love with theatre for as long as I can remember. Being involved with such an industry has given me the ability to be taught some of the hardest lessons from such a young age, how to handle failure and how to keep your passion from determining your self worth.

 

      Rachel Bloom, a Golden Globe winner and musical theatre kid at heart put it best, “That’s how musical theatre kids think, that your talent is synonymous with your self worth sometimes. And it’s not healthy, and that’s what therapists are for!”So, any failure is simply a challenge to break your own record with how fast you can pick yourself back up again and walk into another audition room.

 

       But the challenges still roll in even when you’re blessed enough to be cast in a show. Before Cabaret, the most challenging role I ever had to play was "Philia" in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. She was a ditz, the pinnacle dumb blonde, a prized virgin. A constant note I got from my director was that I was playing her too smart, you could see Emma in her.

 

        When I was cast as Fraulein Kost in Cabaret, it was a fun challenge, she was still a character that was comedic relief but it was because she was smart, because she was always one step ahead.Throughout the first act, she is consistently proving that she has Fraulein Schneider wrapped around her finger, the audience feels as if they at least always know what Kost will pull.

 

        But, by the end of the first act, she spins the story in way the audience would never expect. She speaks ill of Herr Schultz, Fraulein Schneider’s husband to be, for being a Jew to Ernst Ludwig, a beloved character the audience discovered only mere seconds before to be a Nazi.Once given the news, Ludwig decides he can’t possibly stay at the party any longer. To make him stay, Kost leads a Nazi fight song which, by its conclusion, is joined by the entirety of the Kit Kat Club.

 

A final, horrifying note.

Black out.

End of act one.

 

       The song puzzled me for a long time. I wanted to deliver it right, with the proper triumph and oblivious terror. But an obvious roadblock was keeping me from identifying with Kost’s motive. Being from a Jewish family it became more and more daunting to place myself in the shoes of a woman who had such a hatred for an entire group.

 

       When I approached Jay Putnam, our director, about the matter. He stopped, sat back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair, searching. And then,

 

        “Is there something you believe in that no one else does?” he asked.

 

          I laughed, “I’m a liberal in a primarily Republican family. My father introduces me to his friends as a liberal before my first name.”

 

        That was all I needed, that yearning, that hunger to prove to my family that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t some washed up millennial who needed her “safe space” to keep sane. I wanted them to see that my point of view was the direction society could and should be moving into, that the world could be better if we let it.

 

  And in her own twisted way, Fraulein Kost longed for a better world as well. And, slowly but surely, the world was hearing her.