Sally Bowles
Young actress from America who has found work as a singer at a cabaret in Berlin the years when the Nazis were just beginning to rise to power. Sally is a dynamic personality both onstage and off, but her studied performance can lead one to wonder whether she is merely flighty or taking great pains to appear so. She developed what can only be term a “complicated” relationship with another tenant at the boarding house where she lives, Brian.
Brian Roberts
As reserved as Sally is lively, Brian arrives at the boarding house as an English literature student teaching Germans how to speak English. He is sexually confused and after a few failed attempts at seduction, Sally seems more than content with friendship. Germany between the wars resulted in many shocks and surprises to people just when they had come to accept life as being the way it was, however.
Master of Ceremonies
A very curious character who acts as host the Kit Kat Klub where Sally works. He is a talented entertainer, but at times seems to possess an almost Mephistophelian power to manipulate anyone once they come inside. He plays no role in the lives of the characters outside the club, but his performances inside the club are usually symbolic and often ironic commentaries on the events and circumstances taking place among the other characters.
Fritz Wendel
One of Brian's English language students, Fritz is a German Jew who has decided to pass himself off as a Christian due to the dangerous times for Jews. This decision to protect his life brings him into the conflict with his heart as he is deeply in love with a Jewish heiress named Natalia. Sally’s intervention helps Fritz to get past the suspicion on the part of Natalia that he is a mere fortune hunter, but in order to win approval from her father for marriage, he’ll have to reveal himself as Jew.
Natalia Landauer
Prim, proper, Jewish and the heiress to department store wealth, Natalia can be forgiven for suspecting that Fritz might only have designs on her money. Their relationship is rocky more than complicated though complications do arise as a result of the only thing standing in the way of Natalia marrying Fritz being the fact that a Jewish woman marrying a Christian man is not the wisest movie in 1931 Germany. But then again, Fritz is not really Christian.
Maximilian von Heune
Bohemian, aristocratic, homosexual, wealthy, and dangerously naïve when it comes to the Nazi party, Max becomes a part of complicated friends with benefits relationship with Sally and Ben, though actually with both at the same time.
