Cabaret

There's a point at which life, art, and politics intersect. And though at that point the aesthete within us wants to throw up our hands and declare victory to the sublime, the barrel of the gun and the jackboot of history make all sorts of claims to the contrary. Such are the tensions in Cabaret, the renowned musical set in Weimar, Germany, the story of an American writer, a British singer, a Jewish grocer, and a German landlady spinning out amid sex, tunes, ravishing decadence, and the dark, dark, shadow of a nation descending into murderous fascism. The original pedigree of the show goes all the way back to 1966, but it's a show with legs: A revival in the late 1990s was one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.— Quinton Skinner