Our ongoing coverage of the Performing Arts Department’s performance of “Cabaret” continues with the second part of our Q&A session with the cast (Pete Winfrey, a senior, playing the Emcee; Sarah Palay, a junior, playing Sally Bowles; Ariel Saul, a junior, playing Fräulein Schneider; and Anna Richards, a sophomore, playing Fräulein Kost.)

Cadenza: So who are you playing in the show? And if you want to, talk about any big choices you’ve made with the character?

Pete Winfrey: I’m playing the Emcee, so he is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club, a club in Berlin in 1930s Germany. He facilitates all the singing and directing in the play and makes sure the audience is getting everything. And that’s sort of one of the challenges with the character. He’s interacting with the audience as much as everyone onstage, which can be really difficult at times. He’s also sort of the puppeteer, especially in this production, where he makes sure that the play transitions as it does, and [when] little characters pop up that need to be filled, he takes those roles as well. He’s basically the man pulling the strings behind the entire production. I don’t feel like what I’m doing is too crazy for this role because the role is just nuts, but he’s a very sexual, very campy, manic, lonely—all those things to their most extreme.

Sarah Palay: I’m Sally Bowles! Sally is crazy, but she’s awesome. She is a performer at the Kit Kat Club, and I meet Cliff and become very captivated with him, and I get kicked out of the club cause the owner, who I’ve sort of been involved with, gets mad. So I show up at Cliff’s place, which is Fräulein Schneider’s boardinghouse. We describe her as sort of a whirling dervish. She just kind of comes in and takes over and is exciting and captivating. She’s also very tragic because she is desperately clinging to performance. She’s a lost soul and is very young and is looking for somewhere that validates her, and she finds that in the club and the play.

Ariel Saul: I play Fräulein Schneider, who is the owner of the boardinghouse that pretty much all of the characters in the play stay in, or have stayed in, other than the Emcee.

Palay: What about Ernst?

Saul: He has stayed there in the past. That’s how they met, in my (and my character’s) mind. He had such a great time that he recommended all these new boarders to me. That’s what I’ve decided. I don’t care what anyone else thinks, including Ernst.

[laughter]

Anyway, pretty much everyone has stayed in my boarding house, and I try to keep everyone in line. She’s tragic, too. All she wants to do is survive, but she’s so broken from the war and broke, so she settles for less than she deserves all the time. If she has any money, that’s better than no money. She does this with Sally, with Cliff, with Fräulein Kost…that’s an interesting dynamic. She’s a prostitute living in the boardinghouse, and they both hate each other because Kost can’t do her business in the boardinghouse, and I don’t want the reputation of having a prostitute in my boardinghouse, but she needs a place to do her business and I need the money. She falls in love, finally, at 50, with this German Jew, who is also living in the boardinghouse, but then it all gets swept up right from under her feet because it’d be too risky. But she’s strong. She’s a spitfire.

Anna Richards: I’m playing Fräulein Kost. She’s a prostitute, like Ariel said, and so we have a lot of scenes together where we’re in disagreement and they are kind of antagonistic towards each other. She’s a funny character; she’s sneaking soldiers in and out of her room throughout the whole play, but she turns out to be a Nazi sympathizer and sings this very brazen, nationalistic anthem at the end of the first act that kind of brings everyone at this party together and creates this moment where some of the other characters really start to realize how prominent this movement is in their friends and neighbors and fellow Germans. She brings this theme of the intimateness of the Nazis into the world. She lives with them; she’s just a prostitute, but she has all of these frustrations with Germany and she’s selling her body, so she has a lot of problems so she’s ready for a change. It’s really complex, and she represents just how many people in Germany were desperate and willing to follow Hitler.

Cadenza: If you could steal someone else’s role in the show, whose role would it be?

Saul: What a good question!

Palay: I would play Pete’s role.

Saul: No, Herr Schulz.

Palay: Well, Ariel and I have a long-running joke that I would play Herr Schulz, and she would play Fräulein Schneider.

Saul: Because the night before callbacks Sarah and I got together to read through the script. Even though we ended up not needing it, we just sang the songs a bunch of times. But Sarah did all the Sally lines, and I did all the other parts, and I did the Fräulein Schneider and she did all the other parts, and there were a lot of scenes where I was Schneider and she was Schulz, and we had great chemistry! But if I had to steal a role I would steal Sally. I love the song “Cabaret,” and I love singing low. A lot of this is about singing to me, and I love the stuff that Sally sings, and it’d be a different accent from the German one.

Winfrey: Yeah, Sally would be a cool role.

Palay: We should switch one show.

Richards: I would steal the Emcee, absolutely, 100 percent. It’s my dream role. Someday. It’s just fun. And what this show has shown me, unlike other “Cabaret” shows I’ve seen, is how deep and integral he is to the show. Obviously, he narrates and moves the story along, but he also plays such an important part in kind of leading the performers through the crazy drama of showing the audience just how horrible and tumultuous Germany is. He’s so very deep and so very integral, and he watches just about every scene. He’s important, but he’s fun and shows you all the different aspects of the cabaret and the drag and the kick lines and the scariness of Germany.

Cadenza: What about in general? Who is your dream role, regardless of gender?

Winfrey: We were talking the other day about the show “Sunday in the Park with George,” and I think Georges Seurat in that one would be up there. It’s such a [expletive] cool show. It’s not my one dream role, but it’s one I would really love to do.

Saul: Danny Zuko. From “Grease!” My dream role since I was seven was Danny Zuko and probably will always be Danny Zuko. I [expletive]-ing love “Grease.”

Palay: Yikes. This is really silly, but the one part I’ve always wanted to play, and maybe I’m not old enough yet, is Lady Macbeth. She’s super cool. Musical-wise…I don’t know.

Richards: I definitely think my dream role is the Emcee, but my other dream musical role is Éponine in “Les Miz.” My dream drama role would be Lanie Wells in “Two Rooms” by Lee Blessing.

Cadenza: Pete, how do you balance being the lead in a musical, the Edison Theatre intern and president of Thyrsus, along with your school and personal life?

Winfrey: It’s hard sometimes. You just have to prioritize and say that this is realistically what I can get done, and this is what I can’t get done, so a lot of the times it’s just putting the things I know I can get done and that I care about first. And a lot of time it’s just sacrificing time that would have been spent freely otherwise. So weekend mornings I’ll be doing work before rehearsals. It’s just finding time where there is time in the day.

Cadenza: Anyone else want to jump in?

Palay: I struggle. I’m very good at time management, but I try to do everything 100 percent, which is impossible. I really care about the show, but I also care about my classes and being a student. This semester in particular has been difficult with balancing things. Times that I would spend doing things for myself or lounging around or seeing friends or eating a meal might be truncated and sacrificed for other things. But it’s really worth it in the end, to spend these past two months doing this, because it’s just an unmatchable experience.

Saul: I don’t have nearly as much stuff going on as Pete, but boy does “Cabaret” take up a lot of time. I wouldn’t say I would complain about it ’cause I don’t feel negatively about it, but there are times I would be, like, “Oh, no, ‘Cabaret’ eats up my whole life, and I don’t have time to do anything.” Don’t get me wrong, I love it. There’s nothing else I’d rather be doing than being in the theater, being in rehearsal. It’s what I like to do the most, and it’s great to spend all this time doing it, and when it’s over, I’m excited to have my time back, but there’s going to be a huge post-show void, and that’s always the case with me. And I think that comes from putting yourself into something 100 percent. When it’s over, it hits you really, really hard in the end. That’s going to be not very fun, but all good things have to come to an end. The way I cope with it and my schoolwork and being in a sorority and my social life is basically I don’t sleep as much as I should. That sucks, but I’d rather be doing theater.

Cadenza: What do you want the audience to get out of the show if they could only get one thing out of it? What is your number one goal as an actor with “Cabaret”?

[The cast takes a long time to mull it over.]

Winfrey: I guess one of the main things I’ve been thinking about is one of the themes of the show and the cabaret in general, which is just complete self-acceptance. People come to the cabaret with all of their [expletive]-ed up sexual fetishes, all of everything that has been repressed by the rest of society and in this case by Nazis. They just come to the cabaret and are liberated. There’s one monologue that Sally has where she says, “I think people are people, Cliff,” and you shouldn’t be ashamed of having these, specifically with Cliff, homosexual tendencies that you repress. It should be something that is celebrated, and you come to the cabaret, specifically, but in life more generally, and you say whatever the rest of society is saying, “I’m going to do what makes me most complete and fulfills my humanity the most.”

Palay: I think that something that hits home with this show for me is that we all know what happened in Nazi Germany, and I’m Jewish so I have history from my family that dates back to then, but I think what I never realized and what a lot of people never realized was how tumultuous Germany was during that time, and how much people who lived in Berlin were affected by what was going on in Nazi Germany, and it’s a survival story for everyone. Everyone is scraping by for survival, and it’s really sad, and it’s the story of these people who were in Berlin, and they’re not Nazi sympathizers—they’re just trying to live their lives—and the rug gets swept up from underneath them, and what do you do?

Saul: I picked two. They’re connected, though. What I’m going to say is more connected to performance than actual story line or thematic things, but one of the biggest reasons I do theater is to entertain, and I really hope the audience is entertained, which I can’t see how they won’t be. I think it’s a super entertaining show. I mean, objectively, the show in itself is very entertaining regardless of our performance, but it’s also sad and moving and scary. And this is something that our director brought up, but I want the audience to be shocked. I want people to be surprised. She made a good point that nobody is surprised when they come to the theater anymore, and I think if we can surprise people, that would be awesome.

Richards: I would say that what I would want people to take away from my character specifically and what I’ve been learning about her is just as a Nazi sympathizer, how real this whole Nazi movement was and how desperate everyone was in Berlin—that they were willing to just cling onto this Hitler figure, like I said earlier. It’s just all very real.

Cadenza: One final question. So I know that there are going to be chairs onstage, so audience members will be on the actual stage rather than just sitting in the audience. Would you say you’re more nervous or excited for that aspect of the play?

Winfrey: It makes me a little bit nervous ’cause I feel like I’m so comfortable onstage doing my own thing, but at the same time it’s a tremendous opportunity to bring the audience in and make them feel a part of the show that traditional stage-audience separation doesn’t make people feel. Getting the chance to interact with them is sort of what the cabaret was, so it’s a great opportunity.

Palay: It’s going to make me really nervous. But it’s such a great opportunity to bring the audience into the world of the play and really get involved, and I think it’ll be really cool because so much of it is audience interaction, and it’ll make for such a live story that’ll be different every night, even more so than usual. It’s completely unpredictable ’cause we have no idea what the audience will do, where they’re going to laugh, what they’re going to say and to what extent they’ll be included, so it’ll make for a wonderful life to the story that’ll change night to night.

Saul: The show is definitely not complete until we have that audience there, and there are lines that right now people laugh at every time, and it’s totally possible that when we get an audience that line is not funny to them or things that we didn’t know are funny are going to be funny to them, but anyway, I’m super nervous. I’m really terrible about breaking character, also, so this is going to be a huge challenge for me because oftentimes I just look at people and I just start smiling, especially friends. I see this as a huge test of my ability to stay in the world of the play. At the same time, I’m very, very excited. I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but I want them to feel uneasy.

Richards: It’s going to be really cool. That’s all I have to say.

“Cabaret” is playing at the Edison Theatre on Friday and Saturday, Oct. 26 and 27, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, Oct. 28, at 2 p.m. Tickets are available from the Edison Theatre Box Office.