Maybe This Time

Maybe This Time: Glee's Cabaret Revival and an Unexpected Billboard Moment

When Glee premiered on Fox in May 2009 and then returned for its full first season that fall, it transformed the commercial landscape of television music in ways that the industry was not fully prepared to absorb. The show's format, which centered on a high school show choir performing theatrical and pop arrangements of existing songs, created a mechanism by which classic Broadway and pop catalog material could re-enter the charts decades after its original release. "Maybe This Time," a song from the 1966 musical Cabaret with music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, became one of the most notable examples of this phenomenon.

The song had a complicated history before the Glee version brought it to a new audience. Originally cut from the 1966 Broadway production of Cabaret, it was notably performed by Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film adaptation directed by Bob Fosse, where it became one of the movie's signature moments and helped establish Minnelli's association with the material. The 1972 film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Director for Fosse and Best Actress for Minnelli, giving "Maybe This Time" a cultural resonance that extended well beyond the original theatrical run.

For the Glee version, the song was performed by Kristin Chenoweth as April Rhodes, a recurring guest character, and it was included in the episode "The Rhodes Not Taken," which aired on September 23, 2009. Chenoweth brought exceptional Broadway credentials to the performance, having won a Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999 and having starred in the original Broadway production of Wicked. Her presence on the show was itself a significant creative choice, linking the show's theatrical ambitions to a performer with genuine musical theater pedigree.

The Glee Cast version of "Maybe This Time" featuring Kristin Chenoweth was released as a digital single through Columbia Records and debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009. The charting of a song originally written in 1966 on the contemporary Hot 100 in 2009 was a striking illustration of the show's commercial power. The Hot 100's methodology at the time incorporated digital download sales, airplay, and streaming data, and the Glee version accumulated sufficient digital sales to achieve chart placement.

The commercial ecosystem around Glee was extraordinarily lucrative during the show's peak years. Columbia Records and Sony Music, which handled the Glee soundtrack releases, issued multiple volumes of soundtrack albums that consistently performed well on the Billboard 200. The Glee: The Music series generated substantial revenue and demonstrated that television could serve as a primary driver of music consumption rather than merely a supplementary promotional channel. At a moment when the music industry was struggling to adapt to declining physical sales, Glee's ability to convert viewers into music purchasers was genuinely significant.

Chenoweth's performance on the episode was widely praised by television critics. The casting of a Tony-winning Broadway star to perform a song from one of Broadway's canonical works created a meta-theatrical moment that the show's writing staff handled with appropriate awareness. The episode itself explored themes of potential versus regret through the April Rhodes character, making the song's thematic content of hope for a better outcome feel dramatically integrated rather than perfunctory.

The broader Glee effect on the Billboard Hot 100 was a subject of industry discussion throughout the show's run. The show placed 207 songs on the Hot 100 during its active years, a record that broke the Beatles' previous mark for most entries by a single act. That statistic was achieved through the combined effect of the show's large viewership and the digital download purchasing behavior of its dedicated fanbase, who proved willing to buy digital copies of songs they heard on the show in significant volumes.

For Kander and Ebb's catalog, the Glee version of "Maybe This Time" represented a meaningful moment of generational transmission. The song's themes, its exploration of optimism in the face of repeated disappointment, were given fresh presentation to an audience that had little familiarity with the original Minnelli performance or the Cabaret musical tradition from which it emerged. The Glee version, while differing stylistically from the theatrical original, preserved the emotional core of the material and introduced it to a television audience that numbered in the millions each week.