The energy and exhaustion of 1930s Berlin, the debauchery and decadence of the Kit Kat Club and the rise of the Nazis are the backdrop for the classic musical Cabaret, in a wonderful production at the OnStage Playhouse through June 9, directed by Raylene J. Wall. Joe Masterhoff wrote the book; John Kander and Fred Ebb penned the unforgettable music.

Cabaret is about dichotomies and extremes, longing and disappointment, ideals and sacrifice – and mainly, getting by somehow. Adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, Cabaret finds naive young American novelist Clifford Bradshaw (Brian P. Evans) on the train to Berlin in 1929, where he encounters Berliner Ernst Ludwig (Thomas Fitzpatrick). Ludwig solves Cliff’s housing problem with a boardinghouse recommendation and will return for other business later.

In search of a good story, Cliff becomes part of one when he meets chanteuse Sally Bowles (Alisa Williams) at the infamous Kit Kat Club. Sally, British and of questionable background and talent, is both pretty and morally ambiguous, and has become the club’s headliner by the usual showbiz method. But she is also charming in a bohemian kind of way, and when she sets her sights on Cliff, he doesn’t have a chance: Suddenly he finds himself with both a lover and an unexpected roommate.

Meanwhile, Fraulein Schneider (Kate Hewitt), who runs Cliff’s boardinghouse, finds unexpected romance with Jewish fruit merchant Herr Schultz (Ralph Johnson). Also boarding there is Fraulein Kost (Jessica Brandon), ample of endowment and, shall we say, sailor friendly.

These relationships play out over the much larger and more ominous canvas of the imminent and disastrous political and social changes of pre-war Germany.

Holding all the stories together is the emcee (Michael V. Williams), lithe, dissolute and ever-so-slightly scary, who in addition to his job title acts as Greek chorus, commenting on the goings-on before him. When the emcee counsels, “Leaff all your troubles outzide,” he’s talking about more than a spat with your wife.

“In here,” he continues, “life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. The boys are beautiful.”

But the world outside is rapidly becoming uglier and vastly more dangerous, a fact most ominously pointed out at the end of the first act when Fraulein Kost sings the charming and chilling Nazi anthem “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” followed by the appearance of the Nazi flag and blackout.

Cabaret is the best production I’ve ever seen at OnStage. It’s so good that I didn’t even miss the orchestra. OnStage uses tapes (no room for musicians, even if the budget allowed), but the show is done so well that somehow it doesn’t matter.

Congratulations to multi-talented director Wall, who also designed a terrific set and did the sound design. Cabaret requires several different locales, and Wall’s hinged and revolving creations are both inventive and functional.

The cast is excellent. Alisa Williams is a tad more wholesome-looking than one might expect of Sally, but she can sing, dance and act. And her choreography for the show is top-notch.

Hewitt and Johnson brought more than a little mist to my jaded, old eyes with their touching but ill-fated love story. Hewitt’s heartrending “What Would You Do?” never fails to move me.

Brandon is terrific as the accommodating Fraulein Kost; Fitzpatrick chilling as Ludwig.

Wall hasn’t passed up a single chance to make this an outstanding production. Her Kit Kat performers are excellent. My favorite is Lulu (Michele Guisti), gray of hair and tired of demeanor, dragging herself Dietrich-like through yet another set of dance routines and looking oh so bored. Wall has also included a cross-dresser (Dave Hibler), so right for the period and place. But the whole troupe is fine.

Both bitingly satirical and achingly human, Cabaret continues to be relevant beyond the time period portrayed. Broadway director/producer Hal Prince describes the show this way: “It isn’t about Germany, it’s about us. It’s about the power you have if you’re part of a mob that hates anything.”

Cabaret plays through June 9 at OnStage Playhouse in Chula Vista. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets, call 619-422-7787 or visit www.onstageplayhouse.org.

Josephine Baker, born black and poor in east St. Louis in 1906, grew up to become a world-renowned singer and dancer (and one of the highest-paid stars in the world). But she had to move to Paris to do it – a place where her race (a mix of Apalachee Indian and black slaves from South Carolina) did not limit her opportunities.

Common Ground Theatre presents the West Coast premiere of Sherman Yellen and Wally Harper’s musical Josephine Tonight! through May 20 at San Diego Repertory’s Space Theatre. Common Ground’s artistic director, Dr. Floyd Gaffney, directs.

Josephine’s mother, Carrie McDonald (Ida L. Rhem), had herself been a street entertainer with her husband, drummer Eddie Carson, but after he deserted she was obliged to take in laundry to support the family. Josephine (Karole Foreman), always in trouble at school (where she was constantly reprimanded for making faces), left at age 8, and Carrie hired her out to a white woman as a domestic.

But Josephine wanted to perform and did so at every opportunity. Still in her mid-teens, she joined a street band and then a traveling company, ending up in New York. She auditioned for Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along, but was rejected because, at 16, she was “too young, too black and too thin.” After the Broadway run, she was cast for the touring show. After the tour, she worked Harlem’s Cotton Club and at the Plantation Club with Ethel Waters.

Her big break came when she was noticed and signed for La Revue Nègre in Paris at twice the salary she was earning. That show brought le jazz hot to a Paris audience hungry for the new music form and the exoticism of all things African.

That’s the plot line of Josephine Tonight! The show offers some interesting characters and Gaffney has found a generally good cast to play them. Especially notable are the women – Ida L. Rhem as Carrie has the unenviable job of being verbally cruel while trying (or pretending) to be a good mother; Candace Ludlow Trotter is a hoot as Big Bertha (whose “Bertha’s Blues” comes close to stopping the show); and Foreman is a formidable presence as the scrawny little girl who would become the personification of Parisian elegance.

Josephine Tonight! frustrates because limiting the play to the first 20 years of her life in a bouncy musical leaves the audience with the impression that Baker was merely an outrageous showbiz personality who danced in high heels and a rhinestone-studded banana “skirt.”

For all her eccentricities (such as strolling down the Champs-Elysées with her pet cheetah on a leash), she was a humanitarian who became a Red Cross volunteer during World War II. She worked with the French Resistance and was given the Medal of the Resistance and the Croix de Guerre and made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. And when the war was over, she adopted a “rainbow tribe” of at least a dozen orphans of various nationalities, races and cultural backgrounds.

When she came back to tour the U.S., she refused to appear in segregated venues and became the first black American to appear before integrated audiences in Miami’s Copa Club and the first to house her entire troupe in a Las Vegas hotel. She also spoke at the 1963 March on Washington.

Josephine Tonight!, shortened from its opening night length (it now clocks in at two and a half hours including intermission), is a pleasant enough rags-to-riches story as far as it goes, and worth seeing for the performances mentioned. But with its time limit and forgettable songs, it shortchanges and even trivializes the courageous woman behind the image.

Common Ground Theatre’s production of Josephine Tonight! plays through May 20 at San Diego Repertory Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday 2:30 and 7 p.m. For tickets, call 619-544-1000 or visit www.sandiegorep.com.