Shooting this production felt like documenting a beautiful corpse. And I mean that with all the love and heartbreak that implies.
The students were great, of course they were great. They always are. Committed, sweating under those lights, believing in every goddamn note. That’s not the problem. The problem is watching a department that once made me question what theater could be, what performance meant, reduced to mounting competent, perfectly adequate productions of shows that third string touring companies do better in their sleep.
TAPS, Theater and Performance Studies, for fuck’s sake, used to be the place where the lunatics ran the asylum. Where I’d walk into some repurposed basement or courtyard and have my understanding of what constitutes theater completely dismantled. Site-specific work in toilet stalls under the Quad that made you feel something genuine and strange. Experiments that failed gloriously. Graduate students doing weird, uncomfortable, necessary things with their bodies and voices that I couldn’t unsee.
Now? Now they’re doing Cabaret. Which, fine, Cabaret’s a masterpiece. In 1966. On Broadway. Directed by Harold Prince. But here, in 2019, on a campus drowning in student theater groups doing the exact same thing? Ram’s Head has been cranking out musicals with bigger budgets, tighter production values, and more joy for decades. They know what they are. They’re not pretending to push boundaries while playing it safe.
And yeah, I get the institutional defense: “We’re not a conservatory.” No shit. Nobody’s asking you to train the next generation of Broadway belters. But you’re not supposed to be the goddamn English Department either, analyzing texts from a safe academic distance while the students do all the actual making somewhere else.
There’s supposed to be a third way, a place where rigor meets risk, where scholarship informs practice, where the question “what is performance?” actually matters enough to pursue it into uncomfortable territory. That’s the whole fucking point of a research university theater department. Otherwise, you’re just running a shittier version of Juilliard with better reading lists. Making mediocrity your selling pitch is pathetic while coasting on institutional prestige; producing work that’s indistinguishable from every other community college theater program in America. “Perfectly adequate” is not a mission statement. It’s a surrender.
And sure, I’m capturing beautiful composition. The lighting’s moody, the choreography’s solid, the costumes kinda work despite being so busy Timmy’s going to have an epileptic seizure during one of the light changes. But where’s the danger for everybody other than Timmy? Where’s the thing that makes you uncomfortable, that makes you think? The whole fucking point of Cabaret, the Weimar decadence, the creeping fascism, the willful blindness, feels neutered when it’s presented as just another musical, another entertainment, another line on a someone’s resume.
I kept thinking: this is the department that gave us directors and performers who went on to reshape American theater. What happened? When did institutional survival supersede artistic risk? When did the fear of empty seats trump the possibility of revelation?
Every click of the shutter felt elegiac. For what was. For what could have been. For the raw, messy, vital work that nobody asked for but everybody needed.
The saddest part? The production was fine. And that’s exactly the problem. TAPS settling for “fine” is like watching Coltrane play “Happy Birthday” at a kid’s party. Sure, he can do it. But Fuck me, is that really what Stanford theater aspires too?
I left with a card full of images that’ll look great in someone’s portfolio. Professional. Clean.
Utterly forgettable.
Just like the future of experimental theater at this place, apparently.