Willkommen to the seedy, debaucherous world of the Kit Kat Club, where the kinky characters and seductive setting of Theatreworks’ “Cabaret” invite you to leave your troubles outside. This first production in Theatreworks’ 50th anniversary season is a raunchy distraction that continues to resonate nearly 60 years after its debut.

“It is always timely,” said director Scott Levy. “Even though it is set specifically in the background of the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany and rise of Naziism, the themes and storylines and emotions, unfortunately, are still ever more relevant as each day progresses.”

The show, which runs at the Ent Center for the Arts from Thursday through Oct. 12, centers on the economic hardship and growing political unease of 1929–1930 Berlin. But it feels like a peek under a skirt instead of into a history book.

“This period in Germany … there was a freedom of sexuality and sensualness,” Levy said. “That feeling of underground debauchery lies in the foreground while the rise of the political world that would end in Hitler is searing and bubbling up in the background.”

The choice of “Cabaret” as a season opener is an exclamatory and provocative start to Theatreworks’ golden anniversary season, according to newly appointed Artistic Director Max Shulman, who is also an associate professor of theater at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“It’s like lighting off a fireworks display to celebrate the fact that Theatreworks has this great history of doing work that speaks to us at the moment and work that mixes joy and theatricality with the hard questions that we always need to be asking ourselves,” he said.

“Cabaret” evolved first from the semi-autobiographical collection of stories “Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood, which captured the hedonistic exploits of complacent people in a crumbling regime. That book was made into the 1951 play “I am a Camera,” and later the 1966 musical.

It was the daring 1998 restaging of “Cabaret” that put audiences inside the Kit Kat Club and reinserted some of the more sexually liberal and queer content from Isherwood’s book.

Theatreworks’ production enhances this effect by turning 11 of the production’s 12 actors into performers in the club who emerge from the ashes to tell the stories of that chaotic, carnal time and place.

The immersive staging adds to the feel. In this production, seats surround the stage on three sides and provide an unusually close vantage point from which to watch as the characters deliver songs that are at once entertaining and deeply perturbing.

“Every song and every piece and every moment has some kind of larger thematic message,” said Shulman. “Even at its most lewd and frivolous, it’s adding to the larger import of the play and the larger ideas about what it means to live in a society where you’re worried about freedoms slipping away, or worried about the direction that things are going.”

That duality may be the genius of “Cabaret.” While the piece demands audiences ponder something gravely serious — the price of doing nothing in the face of growing evil — Shulman says the bawdy raucousness of the Kit Kat Club also joyfully transports them on “a fun trip to another world.”