The Old Globe enjoys an extraordinary reputation as a home for great works of musical theatre. Since the debut here of Into the Woods in 1986, over a dozen world premiere musicals (plus another dozen or so non-musicals) have gone from our stages to Broadway—the most recent of which was this year’s Bob Fosse’s Dancin’. But we’ve also done important work reviving classic musicals in thrilling productions that reveal the inner workings of well-known shows in bracing new ways. Tonight’s reimagined version of Cabaret does precisely that.

This famous musical is nearly 60 years old, which, given how stunningly contemporary it continues to feel, is to me a marvel. Its creators are among the Mount Rushmoreans of the American musical stage: John Kander and Fred Ebb, along with book writer Joe Masteroff, are justly celebrated for this and other works. Bob Fosse, whose 1972 film of the musical enshrined it in the pantheon of greatness, makes his own claim on the show’s history.

But its original director, Harold Prince, really was the artist who guaranteed the show’s immortality. Cabaret was a crucial step in Prince’s development of what he called the “concept musical,” a form that departed from traditional musical theatre dramaturgy by foregrounding metaphor or political meaning and seeing narrative as a means to a larger resonance rather than an end in itself. Cabaret’s Kit Kat Klub is its key conceptual innovation. The musical numbers performed there—which comment on the romantic plots of the play and glance at politics, gender, and sexuality—are the backbone of the show, and they add surprising balance and resonance to the more conventional romance narratives that drive the story.

And the Kit Kat Klub and what happens there, and how generations of interpreters have presented the cabaret in Cabaret, are what has ensured the musical’s continued relevance. In 1966, the Emcee, in Joel Grey’s legendary performance, was more marionette than man, asexual and menacing. By the early 1990s, director Sam Mendes reconceived the character in Alan Cummings’s also legendary star turn as a hypersexualized, androgynous figure of pure id: a personification of the Weimar Republic’s subconscious energies. In the ’60s, the figure of American novelist Clifford Bradshaw was as straight as he was straitlaced, but subsequent revivals liberated his closeted sexuality and restored the conception of the character from Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories,” the original source material from the 1920s and ’30s. The more that directors surfaced the subterranean impulses in the story, the more their opposing forces gained dramatic power, and the more this musical about the rise of fascism came to be seen as a potent warning to democracies about how fragile they can be at times of populist churn and demagogic fearmongering.

Nazis, sexuality, political ferment: quite the recipe for a musical comedy! The triumph of Cabaret is how entertaining it is, given its conceptual sophistication and thematic seriousness. In this sense, the engine of Cabaret is the tension between its form and its content. We tap our feet at a brassy banger of a score and we grin at sexy dance numbers, all while we hold in another part of our brain our knowledge of what happened in Berlin just a few years after this story ends.

Josh Rhodes’s new revival seizes on this tension. Globe audiences remember fondly this brilliant artist’s choreography in Bright Star and direction and choreography of Guys and Dolls, as well as his thrilling directorial work with Baskerville. Josh sees Cabaret as what the artists of 1930s Germany would have called a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” in which many different art forms combine to create a single cohesive whole. Movement, choreography, music, text, and design all work together to make what is as much an installation as a musical, even as drama, comedy, and vaudeville twirl around each other to conjure friction and joy and transport an audience on a tide of emotion. It’s a major achievement, fulfilling Prince’s original hopes for this musical, riffing on the Mendes revival, and, in the end, becoming something all its own. I’m deeply proud to have Josh and his collaborators on the Globe stage, adding to our legacy of excellence in the musical theatre.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.