Cabaret: Entertainment Where the Audience Is Eating
Cabaret is live entertainment performed in a restaurant or club while the audience sits at tables. The French word originally meant the tavern itself, not the show.
Cabaret is performance staged among diners rather than in front of rows of seats. Song, comedy and dance are the usual ingredients. The intimacy is the point: performer and audience share a room, and the show can answer the audience back.
- Entertainment in a club or restaurant. *The hotel puts on a cabaret at nine.*
- The venue itself. *A small cabaret in Montmartre.*
- A style of performance. *Cabaret songs of the Weimar years.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | cabaret | A late-night cabaret. |
| Plural | cabarets | The cabarets of Berlin. |
| Attributive | cabaret act | A polished cabaret act. |
| Person | cabaret singer | A cabaret singer of the old school. |
| Related | revue | A satirical revue. |
How it is used in a sentence
- They booked a cabaret for the anniversary dinner.The show as a hired item.
- Seating was cabaret style, at round tables.A layout term used by event planners.
- Weimar cabaret was political as often as it was frivolous.The Berlin scene of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Cabaret, revue, variety and vaudeville
- Cabaret — performed among tables, intimate, often satirical
- Revue — a themed programme of sketches and songs, on a stage
- Variety — a bill of unconnected acts, British music-hall descendant
- Vaudeville — the American equivalent of variety, family-oriented
From French *cabaret*, a tavern, possibly from a Picard word for a small room. The performance sense grew in late nineteenth-century Paris, where Le Chat Noir opened in 1881 and gave the form its shape.
Is the final t pronounced?
No. It is said cab-a-RAY, keeping the French ending.
What is cabaret seating?
An event layout with the audience at small round tables facing the stage, rather than in rows.