There’s a story of a Sound of Music production-meeting where
someone nervously wondered whether the show wasn’t just a teensy bit
controversial. “You mean,” said Richard Rodgers, “it might upset
people who like Nazis?”

Upsetting people who like Nazis is something even the New York
theater’s prepared to do, as witness the current crop of
ostentatiously swastikaed revivals: The Diary of Anne Frank (at
the Music Box), Cabaret (at the Kit Kat Klub), and The Sound of
Music itself (at the Martin Beck). But even the one corner of our
recent past on which an apparent consensus holds is not an
impregnable fortress: the sturdiest play is no more than tempting
Lebensraum for the more ambitious theatrical imagination.
Even
something as apparently straightforward as
Anne Frank’s diary has
passed through, among other hands, the Stalinist palms of Lillian
Hellman.

The three revivals concern themselves with different stages of Nazi
progress: the last days of Weimar, the Anschluss of Austria, the
occupation of the Netherlands. All of them are one stage removed
from American experience (and British, for this Cabaret is a
London import). But that doesn’t mean you don’t hear other axes
being ground, rather than the Axis being ground: thus, in the new
coda to Cabaret, the stars of the Berlin nightclub are dispatched
to the gas chambers wearing both a yellow star and a pink triangle,
not necessarily in that order. In all three productions, the Nazis
are the bad guys. What there