If You Could See Her

"If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song)"
Song
Written	1966
Genre	Show tune
Composer	John Kander
Lyricist	Fred Ebb

"If You Could See Her (The Gorilla Song)" is a show tune from the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret and its 1972 film adaptation. Joel Gray performs the song in both as the Emcee, having originated the role on Broadway. ^[1] Performed in the middle of the show's second act, ^[a] it satirizes the wide-spread and deepening acceptance of antisemitism in Weimar-era Germany as the Nazi party rose to power.

Synopsis

Background

Immediately preceding this number is a duet between the characters Herr Schultz, a fruit shop owner, and Fraulein Schneider, who operates a boarding house. Schultz, a Jew, tries to ease Schneider's concerns that the rising acceptance of antisemitism in Germany would, in the event of their interfaith marriage, threaten her business. The Emcee brings Schultz’s singing to an abrupt end by dropping a brick between the two, symbolizing a brick thrown through the shop window. Schultz tries to reassure her that it is merely rowdy children making trouble, but Fräulein Schneider is afraid. ^[3]

Performance

The song is performed by the Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub, a fictional cabaret club in Berlin, as he courts and dances with his love interest, another performer in a gorilla costume wearing a dress. Throughout the song, he asks the audience to be open-minded about their relationship, and not judge who someone loves because of their appearance. ^[4]

In the final lines of the song ("If you could see her through my eyes, / She wouldn't look Jewish at all"), it is revealed that the gorilla is meant to be a symbolic stand-in for a Jew. ^{[2] [5]}

Reactions

The set design in the original 1966 production made use of a large, distorted mirror suspended above the stage. After the Emcee finishes the song, the mirror stops distorting the theater audience, allowing them to see themselves in the moment. According to scholar Bruce Kirle, "The audience was able to witness its individual reactions to this racist joke. Some laughed, some were shocked, while others were simply hypnotized into watching their own reactions and those of their fellow spectators." ^[6]

Changes to lyrics

Frank Ebb intended for the song to highlight the growing acceptance of antisemitism, noting that the original final lyric "got an amazing reaction from the audience, because they did laugh, and then they kind of realized what they were laughing at, and they would stop laughing." ^[7] He elaborates on the lyric being the crux of the piece:

I wanted it to be about anti-Semitism, and it all worked from there, to show how anti-Semitism had crept into the cabaret. That was my intent, and eventually the line "If you could see her through my eyes, / She wouldn't look Jewish at all" generated the whole number.

— John Kander ^[8]

The final line of the lyric was changed from "she doesn't look Jewish at all" to "she isn't a meeskite ^[b] at all" by producer and director Harold Prince in reaction to pressure from local Jewish leaders during pre-Broadway runs in Boston. ^{[10] [9] [4]} In earlier productions of Cabaret, "Meeskite" was the title of another number performed by Schultz, where its negative connotation is established. ^{[2] [5]} Joel Grey resented this change during the original run, which he saw as an effort to “soften the blow” and "impact" of the scene. During the pre-Broadway run, he would sometimes "forget" to swap out the original lyric during a performance. ^[5]

Director Bob Fosse reinstated the original line in the 1972 film, and it is now included in modern productions of the musical. ^{[4] [9]}

Analysis

Jay Geller, a professor of Jewish Studies, uses the song as an example in his analysis of the history of antisemitism and ape imagery:

The ape continues to figure ugliness into the present, and so too does the representation of the Jew as ape continue to figure the Jew as ugly: whether confirmed by the often bowdlerized last line of the love duet “If you could see her [through my eyes]” that the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club sang to his gorilla-garbed partner—"She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”—or the Jewish wedding staged by clowns in orangutan costumes, the groom in suit and kippah, the bride in wedding gown, at Moscow’s Circus Nikulina in 2009. ^[11]

Warren Hoffman, a professor at Rutgers University, compares the Emcee’s role in the number to another Kander and Ebb musical, The Scottsboro Boys :

“Kander and Ebb had performed similar work in Cabaret, utilizing the history of 1930s German cabarets as a way to frame a story about anti-Semitism. In The Scottsboro Boys, the unctuousness of Cabaret’s Hitler-like emcee has been replaced by the southern “gentility” of the racist Interlocutor. Similarly, just as Cabaret played with its audiences in a song like “If You Could See Her through My Eyes,” a number whose punch line compares Jews to gorillas, here too we are asked to think about the minstrel show as a site of simultaneous “amusement” and racial oppression.” ^[12]

Notes

1. Originally, the song opened the show's third act. ^[2]
2. Meeskite (sometimes spelled mieskeit) is a Yiddish word for "ugly", sometimes used as a pejorative towards Jewish women. ^[9]

References

1. Benjamin & Rosenblatt 2024, p. 31.
2. Filichia, Peter (November 13, 2012). "That Controversial Cabaret Lyric Change". The Official Masterworks Broadway Site (Blog). Sony Music Entertainment. Archived from the original on September 8, 2025. Retrieved December 7, 2024.
3. Masteroff, Kander & Ebb 1967, pp.  212-13, photo insert.
4. Belletto 2009, p. 610.
5. Grey, Joel (November 24, 2024). "I Starred in 'Cabaret.' We Need to Heed Its Warning". Opinion. The New York Times . Retrieved December 7, 2024.
6. Kirle 2005, p. 117.
7. Mizejewski 1992, p. 177.
8. Kander, Ebb & Lawrence 2003, p. 64.
9. McLaughlin, Katie (February 13, 2013). "Life is (still) a 'Cabaret'". Entertainment. CNN . Retrieved December 7, 2024.
10. Mizejewski 1992, p. 178.
11. Geller 2018, p. 128.
12. Hoffman 2020, pp. 232–33.

Sources

• Benjamin, Ruth; Rosenblatt, Arthur (October 17, 2024). Movie Song Catalog: Performers and Supporting Crew for the Songs Sung in 1460 Musical and Nonmusical Films, 1928-1988. McFarland. ISBN   978-0-7864-8769-1.
• Geller, Jay (2018). ""If you could see her through my eyes …": Semitic Simiantics". Bestiarium Judaicum: Unnatural Histories of the Jews . Fordham University Press. pp. 109–38. ISBN   978-0-8232-7561-8. JSTOR   10.2307/j.ctt1xhr6f6 . Retrieved November 26, 2025.
• Haidar, Maya Mehr (July 3, 2024). "Satirical Intermedialities in "Springtime for Hitler" (1967) and "If You Could See Her" (1972): a Comparative Study". Syn-Thèses: 11–23. doi:10.26262/ST.V0I15.10072. Archived from the original on March 19, 2025. Retrieved November 26, 2025.
• Hoffman, Warren (February 14, 2020). "Exit Music". The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical . Rutgers University Press. pp. 225–34. ISBN   978-1-9788-0741-9. JSTOR   10.2307/jj.8916139 . Retrieved November 26, 2025.
• Kander, John; Ebb, Fred (1999). The Complete Cabaret Collection (Songbook): Vocal Selections (Author's ed.). Hal Leonard. ISBN   978-1-4584-5040-1 . Retrieved December 7, 2024.
• Kander, John; Ebb, Fred; Lawrence, Greg (2003). Colored lights: forty years of words and music, show biz, collaboration, and all that jazz. New York: Faber and Faber. ISBN   978-0-571-21133-3.
• Kirle, Bruce (2005). Unfinished Show Business. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN   978-0-8093-2667-9.
• Leve, James (2009). "The Divinely Decadent Lives of Cabaret". Kander and Ebb . New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 35–76. JSTOR   j.ctt5vm595.7 . Retrieved November 26, 2025.
• Masteroff, Joe; Kander, John; Ebb, Fred (1967). "Cabaret". In Guernsey Jr., Otis L. (ed.). The best plays of 1966-1967. The Burns Mantle Yearbook. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. pp. 209–212. Retrieved December 17, 2025.
• Mizejewski, Linda (1992). "(Nazi) Life Is a Cabaret: Sally Bowles and Broadway Musical". Divine decadence: fascism, female spectacle, and the makings of sally bowles . Princeton University Press. pp. 159–99. ISBN   978-1-4008-6300-6. JSTOR   j.ctt7zvgks . Retrieved November 26, 2025.

Further reading

Books and chapters

• Garebian, Keith (April 20, 2011). The Making of Cabaret (Second ed.). Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 35, 60, 67, 85–86, 114, 121, 143, 150, 166, 174, 176, 183, 189. ISBN   978-0-19-983019-0.

Journal articles

• Belletto, Steven (2009). "Cabaret and antifascist aesthetics" . Criticism. 50 (4): 609–30. doi:10.1353/crt.0.0081. ISSN   1536-0342 . Retrieved July 12, 2025.
• Gordon, Terri J. (2008). "Film in the Second Degree: "Cabaret" and the Dark Side of Laughter" . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 152 (4): 440–65. ISSN   0003-049X. JSTOR   40541603 . Retrieved April 30, 2025.
• Lareau, Alan (December 1991). "The german cabaret movement during the weimar republic" . Theatre Journal. 43 (4): 471–92. doi:10.2307/3207977. ISSN   0192-2882. JSTOR   3207977 . Retrieved July 12, 2025.

Other media

• Thomas, Sophie (January 17, 2023). "A complete guide to all the songs in 'Cabaret'". London Theatre . Retrieved December 7, 2024.

External links

• "If You Could See Her" from Cabaret (1973) on YouTube