Der morgige Tag ist mein

Obviously Cabaret is one of the gayest films ever made. (Lisa Minnelli, for crying out loud!) And this particular scene works much better on the stage. The song 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' is actually a chilling/thrilling pastiche of the sort of volkische stuff the Hitler Jugend actually used to sing - so much so that when the play first came out in Germany there were former HJs who protested that it brought back bad memories for them of their having been made to sing those very same words as children. More to the point, and especially if you ignore the incongruous way it's sung in this clip (by a dyed-blonde boy with too-even teeth and beauty-spots), it's also hugely charming little lied. In the stage-version its a song that's reprised several times in the first act in between scenes, normally by stage-hands as they move furniture around. It's only at the end of Act I, with the "Fatherland, Fatherland"-verse and the salute, that it becomes clear what the song's really about. Unlike in the film-version, which features the two fey male characters slipping smugly away, on stage it actually makes for an engaging climax to the first half of the play (the second half of which, like the Third Reich itself, sadly doesn't even nearly live up to the promise of its beginning).

The German version is on line here.