Brian Bantugan: How did you prepare for the role?

Keenan Viau: First I started out with learning everything that I could about Nazi Germany and what was happening in 1929. The problem when I was doing the research was, like most people when they think of Nazism, I thought of the late ’30s, when they’d already established power. This plays happens before that, when their movement was just starting to get popular. The play takes place after the economic crash, so I was concerned with how Nazism was taking hold of Germany at that point. I’ve been taking that info and looking at it from the eyes of a young American who comes from a conservative background and who is gay but who can’t show it in America. But in Berlin, he’s allowed to express that part of himself. He’s this kind of cerebral writer who is discovering his body and what he likes, and I’m combining that with the sense of the world he’s living in.

Were there any influences that helped you shape your performance?

Part of the challenge for me in this role is the fact that Cliff is gay and I’m not. I’m from Hicksville, and I come from a very, for lack of a better word, butch background. But I’m enjoying trying to wrap my head around what it means to be gay and what it means to be a man.

Will & Grace was an influence because the relationship that Cliff and Sally built together is very much like that of Will and Grace, but instead they sleep together.

What do you hope the audience takes away with them?

I think it would be, not to sound presumptuous at all, that everyone is just accepted – that people are gay, that people are straight, that people are bi. It doesn’t matter, because in the world of the cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, everyone does it. It’s only in the real world outside the club where you remember what parts of society think. There’s a lot of raunchiness, raw sexuality, fetish and BDSM that comes into play in the show. But it’s all accepted; it’s not there to shock because it’s just part of their world.

How is Cabaret relevant now to Toronto?

It kind of scares me a bit with what is happening with Mayor Ford. It scares me when I think about how these conservative parties can get a hold of things and control them. In a sense, Cabaret is like the gay community or the theatre community or the fetish community. It’s representative of all these kinds of leftwing groups. We’ve got a Conservative government in power. We have Stephen Harper, and he’s got a majority and he can do whatever he wants. We’re never really safe.
 
I also think about what might happen to the US, where there’s a good chance that the Republican Tea Party could take over the same way that the Nazis did. What happened to Germany in 1929 and what’s happening in America in 2011 is similar. I don’t think it would take much for the Obama age to be compared with the Weimar Republic. Suddenly Obama could be voted out and then they’d get someone who is very conservative, who doesn’t believe in gay rights, and suddenly all the important rights get taken away.

Do you have anything to say to the gay community, who have always found a connection with Cabaret?

I love you guys! I have so many gay friends. They’re some of the best people I have ever met, this coming from a straight guy from Hicksville.
 
Cabaret runs from Fri, Jan 13 to Sat, Jan 28, 8pm, at the Hart House Theatre, 7 Hart House Circle. $10-25. harthousetheatre.ca
 
Brian Bantugan is a fab writer who believes that Toronto will see more of Herr Keenan Viau after Cabaret.