When Marisha Wallace asked her agent to get her an audition for Cabaret , the request came with some of her own research. “I had asked a friend about it, and I was like, ‘Why has there never been a full-time Black Sally Bowles?’ There have been understudies and stuff,” she recalls. “He was like, ‘There weren’t that many Black people [in Germany] in the 1930s.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not true. Can’t be true.’”

So Wallace — who had just finished a run as Adelaide in Guys and Dolls , another role that Black actors don’t typically get to play, and one that netted her an Olivier Award nomination — looked it up. Sure enough, she learned that several thousand Black people, including American expats fleeing concurrent racism in the U.S., were living in Germany at the time, and that Nazi

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