Perhaps this is where the serious watchers like you diverge from the casual observer like myself, but I'm willing to go along with this assertion because I remember being particularly moved by Cabaret in a way a thousand political essays about moral fiber and democracy couldn't quite achieve.
I'm not supposed to, copy rights & all, but i've posted this lyric from my Alice musical in TPF before and i'll try it here to make a point. It's essentially Nietzsche's old saw about untested virtue, but it's really hard to dance to Nietzsche. Here, it's the music to the Caucus Race, performed by the people who live under the NYC's subway. imagine barbershop quartet until the bolded words, then sleazy vaudeville for the remainder:
OLD-FASHIONED VALUES
O, whatever happened to
Those old golden days,
The gentler ways of the past?
Kids behaved and flags were waved
Life, simple and sure
And all good things were built to last.
Who doesn't wish for a time when every line had to rhyme?!
What about old-fashioned values
Makes me just want to.....
.THROW UP!
Women kept mum,
Darkies under the thumb.
Lock up the bums
With the deaf and the dumb.
Why would we want to go back to
A world where no one had a voice
When a handful of fools
Made up all of the rules
And nobody else got a choice
What about old-fashioned values
Drives me straight out of my mind?
Closet the gays
In those Gay Nineties ways.
Win on a field
Where nobody else plays.
The good old days were awfully easy
With so many people left out
Still waiting to see
A world where all can be free.
Real liberty what we're about.
...and who doesnt want to leave a theater humming along to Nietzsche?!