What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.

Put down the knitting,
The book and the broom.
Time for a holiday.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret.

Come taste the wine,
Come hear the band.
Come blow your horn,
Start celebrating
Right this way,
Your table's waiting.

No use permitting
some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret

I used to have this girlfriend
known as Elsie
With whom I shared
Four sordid rooms in Chelsea

She wasn't what you'd call
A blushing flower
As a matter of fact
She rented by the hour.

The day she died the neighbours
came to snicker:
"Well, that’s what comes 
from to much pills and liquor."

But when I saw her laid out like a Queen
She was the happiest corpse
I'd ever seen.

I think of Elsie to this very day.
I remember how she’d turn to me and say:
"What good is sitting all alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret."

And as for me, and as for me,
I made up my mind back in Chelsea,
When I go, I'm going like Elsie.

Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
It isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Only a Cabaret, old chum,
And I love a Cabaret