Cabaret Play Guide

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PRESENTED BY
PLABYYJEFFGTUURNERIDE
First They Came For the Communists
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
by Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller
a prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor
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CABARET
TABLE OF CONTENTS
4Synopsis
5
Birth of the Weimar Republic (1919–1933)
6
Berlin: City of Change
10The Rise of the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party (NSDAP)
11
Looking for Isherwood’s Berlin
14Origins of a Musical: Hal Prince and Cabaret
16
Anatomy of a Scene
19
For Further Reading
20
About the Producers
All materials in the Cabaret play guide were researched
and written by Jeff Turner, Associate Professor of Theatre Arts
at Hamline University.
is being produced as part of Broadway Re-Imagined, a
partnership of Theater Latté Da and Hennepin Theatre Trust,
at the Pantages Theatre in Minneapolis.
Music Direction by DENISE PROSEK
Choreography by MICHAEL MATTHEW FERRELL
Directed by PETER ROTHSTEIN
January 15 – February 9, 2014
This activity is made possible by
the voters of Minnesota through
a Minnesota State Arts Board
Operating Support grant, thanks to
a legislative appropriation from the
arts and cultural heritage fund.
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
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CABARET
SYNOPSIS
CABARET
Book by JOE MASTEROFF
Lyrics by FRED EBB
Music by JOHN KANDER
TYLER MICHAELS (THE EMCEE) PHOTO BY TOM SANDELANDS
I
determined to do the right thing and agrees to take a risky job to
bring in some more money while Sally ponders the possibility of
genuine love (“Maybe This Time”). Meanwhile, the Emcee and
company interrogate the dangerous, alluring power of cold, hard
cash (“Money”), and Herr Schultz proposes to Fräulein Schneider
after Fräulein Kost, a prostitute and lodger in the house, catches
Schultz sneaking out of the landlady’s rooms (“Married”). At the
couple’s engagement party, anti-Semitic remarks are made and a
Nazi anthem is sung as many of the characters helplessly watch
in silence.
n the waning, politically unstable years of the Weimar
Republic (1920–1933), the Emcee of the notorious Kit Kat
Klub, an erotic cabaret in the Berlin’s Schöenberg district,
bids the audience “willkommen, bienvenue, welcome” and
introduces us to the cabaret boys and girls just as a young
American writer, Cliff Bradshaw, crosses the German border
on a train to the capital city (“Willkommen”). Upon arrival,
Cliff is directed to Fräulein Schneider’s boarding house by a new
German acquaintance, Ernst Ludwig, and the Fräulein haggles
with him over the amount of rent money he is able to afford
(“So What”). During his first night on the town, Cliff is enticed
into the Emcee’s “seedy little dive” where he encounters a British
performer, Sally Bowles, who entertains the audience on New
Year’s Eve with a naughty up-tempo number (“Don’t Tell Mama”).
Heading backstage to seek out Bobby, a young man he slept with
in London, Cliff takes a wrong turn and finds himself in Sally’s
dressing room only moments after she has been fired by the club’s
manager (“Mein Herr”).
The next morning Fräulein Schneider confesses to Schultz that
she worries about marrying a Jewish man in the current political
climate. Herr Schultz’s fruit shop is attacked when someone
throws a brick through the window, but Schultz refuses to
acknowledge the mounting concern. Back at the Kit Kat Klub,
the Emcee performs a song-and-dance routine with a girl in a
Gorilla suit, sardonically challenging the audience’s perceptions
on intercultural relationships (“If You Could See Her”). Schneider
soon returns Sally and Cliff’s engagement present. She is calling
off the wedding and refuses to listen to Cliff’s reasoning (“What
Would You Do?”). Cliff tells Sally that he is taking her back to
America so they can raise the baby together. Defiant, Sally resists,
declaring how beautiful their life is in Berlin, and Cliff sharply
tells her to “wake up” and take notice of the imminent danger
surrounding them. Sally retorts that politics have nothing to do
with them or their affairs. Following this heated argument, Sally
walks out on Cliff and returns to the club as the Emcee sings a
plaintive ballad (“I Don’t Care Much”).
The next day Sally interrupts Cliff’s English lesson with Ernst,
barging into his room at the boarding house with her luggage
and flirtatiously inviting herself to live with the American writer.
Affronted, Cliff is reticent to agree to such an arrangement, but
Sally’s charismatic will wins him over (“Perfectly Marvelous”),
and back at the club the Emcee and two dancers celebrate the
enduring value of roommates (“Two Ladies”). Herr Schultz,
an older Jewish man who lodges at Fräulein Schneider’s and
owns a fruit shop in the district, romances his landlady with
the gift of an exotic pineapple (“It Couldn’t Please Me More”).
Consequently, the impish Emcee inveigles the audience with
a glimpse of the growing popularity of Hitler’s Nazi Party
(“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”).
Chasing after Sally, Cliff is beaten up by Nazi thugs and
dragged out of the club just as Sally is welcomed back to the
stage (“Cabaret”). The next morning Cliff says goodbye to Herr
Schultz and pleads for Sally to take the train with him to Paris.
She refuses, announcing she has had an abortion and Cliff slaps
her across the face. Asking him to dedicate his novel to her, a
heartbroken Cliff leaves for the train station. As the train departs,
Cliff begins to write about his experiences.
Four months later, Cliff is happily distracted by the endless
evenings of nightclubs and soirées, yet his writing suffers.
Wondering if it is time to move on, Sally reveals she is pregnant,
is uncertain as to who fathered the child and is resigned to
yet another abortion. As if awakened by this news, Cliff is
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CABARET
BIRTH OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
(1919–1933)
D
uring the first week of November 1918, a civil
insurrection spread across Germany driven by a warfatigued public and a nascent workers’ movement
inspired by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
Referred to as the “November Revolution,” this
nation-wide rebellion ultimately resulted in the
collapse of Germany’s imperial government, the abdication
of Emperor Wilhelm II and the declaration of a new German
republican regime on 9 November 1918. The initial transfer
of power to Friedrich Ebert, leader of the progressive though
politically moderate Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD),
was secured by the election of a Constituent National Assembly
in January 1919 (an election in which German women were
first granted the right to vote). The National Assembly would
soon become known as the German parliament or Reichstag.
In June 1919 the provisional government ended World War I
when it signed the Treaty of Versailles and agreed to military
disarmament, territorial concessions and the payment of
reparations for loss and damage suffered by the Allied Powers
during the “Great War.” A new German constitution was
written in the following month. Though imperfect the Weimar
constitution granted freedoms of religion, speech and assembly
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
as well as progressive reform initiatives and greater civil liberties
for all individuals, but its mix of parliamentary and presidential
systems as well as the inclusion of Article 48, an emergency decree
provision which gave the president broad powers to suspend civil
liberties with a poorly structured system of checks and balances,
would be its undoing. Additionally, the constitution called for
a proportional representation of elected legislators splintering
power across a wide variety of political parties and requiring
the formation of fragile coalition governments throughout the
Republic’s 14 years. This would be a radical change from the
imperial regimes of Otto von Bismarck and Emperor Wilhelm II
who provided Germans with strong, stable and decisive authority.
The November Revolution officially ended on 11 August 1919
when the Weimar Republic constitution was adopted by a
majority coalition government led by the SPD in collaboration
with the Catholic Centre Party (Zentrum) and the German
Democratic Party (DDP). While enduring great pressure between
communist factions on the extreme-left and nationalist factions
on the extreme-right, the Weimar Republic would suffer from
economic instability and hyperinflation for a number of years
before government-imposed measures stabilized the currency
in 1924.
5
CABARET
BERLIN: CITY OF CHANGE
In an essay published in conjunction with
“Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from
the 1920s,” an exhibition curated in 2006
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ian
Buruma acknowledges how Berlin’s cabaret
culture in the years following World War I
reflected a city on the precipice of change.
I
n the final years of the Weimar Republic there were
over 500 venues in the city presenting bawdy and carnal
performances. Baruma writes, “The pumped-up naughtiness
of ‘erotic reviews,’ the lines of naked women kicking
their legs in a frenzy to syncopated music, were typical
of a decade when everything appeared to have become
unhinged after a monstrous war that mutilated a generation.
This atmosphere was especially intense in Berlin, the capital of
a country that was reeling from the shock of mass slaughter,
defeat in war, failed revolution, economic catastrophe, and
hyperinflation. With the brutal destruction of the old order—
the class system, the authority of monarchy and the church, the
discipline of the parade ground—anything seemed possible.
This provided fertile ground for sexual adventure and artistic
experimentation but was also the source for social panic, from
which the hedonism of the brothel and the dance hall—and, a
few years later, massive rallies to worship the Führer—offered a
temporary escape.”
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
The capital city of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918) and the
German Empire (1871–1918), Berlin was transformed following
the constitutional establishment of the Weimar Republic in
1919. The “Greater Berlin Act of 1920” saw the capital city of
the new republican government expand from 25 square miles
to over 340 as seven towns, 59 rural communities and 27 estate
districts were officially incorporated into the new metropolis,
6
CABARET
doubling the population from 1.9 million to nearly 4 million
residents. It is hard not to think of Berlin during the twenties and
early-thirties as a modernist experiment in urban planning and
cultural production. It certainly attracted sophisticates and thrill
seekers. Indeed, in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968)
historian Peter Gay notes that Berlin became a magnet. Gay
writes, “The old Berlin had been impressive, the new Berlin was
irresistible. To go to Berlin was the aspiration of the composer,
the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its hundred
and twenty newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place
for the ambitious, the energetic, the
talented. Wherever they started, it
was in Berlin that they became, and
Berlin that made them famous.”
One such transplant was writer and
intellectual Erich Kästner who, fired
by a newspaper in Leipzig in 1927,
moved to Berlin to be at the center of
the action. His 1929 poem “Visit from
the Country” captures the danger and
ERICH KÄSTNER
allure of Berlin:
MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD:
SEXUAL PIONEER
Magnus Hirschfeld
(1868–1935) was a
physician, sexuality rights
activist and founder of the
Scientific Humanitarian
Committee in 1897
– probably the first
organization in the West
to openly advocate for the
social and legal acceptance
of homosexual, bisexual
and transgender persons.
The Committee was
also dedicated to
overturning Paragraph 175 of the German penal code
which criminalized same-sex relationships between
consenting adults in 1871. In 1919, inspired by the more
progressive climate of the Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld
founded the Institute for the Science of Sexuality which
contained a research library, offices for marriage and sex
counseling, sexual and reproductive health education,
contraceptive health education, and medical treatment
for sexually transmitted diseases. Located in Berlin, the
Institute also campaigned for human rights and sexual
freedom. Visited by more than 20,000 people every year
and providing free treatment and counseling for the poor,
the Institute’s efforts to reform did not go unnoticed by the
more conservative factions warring against the “decadence”
of Berlin. In Sexual Catastrophes: Pictures from Modern
Sexual and Married Life (1926), Hirschfeld challenged
those who did not accept sexual difference to be a “natural,
in-born disposition.” Railing against Paragraph 175 as a
medieval form of injustice, Hirschfeld writes, “There is a
reluctance to speak about the fact of homosexuality. To
understand it requires serious consideration, which means
intellectual exertion. So some plead that the topic is not
respectable enough for them. Understanding homosexuality
presupposes a psychological reorientation, a self-liberation
from the tutelage of the legislator who ignorantly subsumes
homosexuality and depravity under the same concept.”
In 1929 the Reichstag came very close to striking down
Paragraph 175 due to Hirschfeld’s efforts. The provision
was cut from the penal code by a judiciary committee vote
but failed to become law before the democracy collapsed.
When the Nazis took control of the government in 1933,
the Institute for the Science of Sexuality was raided and
thousands of books were looted from the library and burned
in the streets. Hirschfeld was Jewish and had already left his
country for an extended lecture tour. He never returned to
Germany and died of a heart attack in France in 1935.
Confused they wait at Potsdam Square,
Berlin seems too loud for them,
Night glows like a million.
A lady beckons “Come along, my darling’.
And her legs are terribly bare.
They marvel and they are too tense,
They walk around the street in awe.
Streetcars screech, tires squeal,
They want to be at home,
Berlin is too much for them.
It sounds as if the city moans
Because they made a mistake,
Houses sparkle, the subway roars,
Everything they see seems fake,
And Berlin is far too rough.
Their legs are bent with anxiety.
They get it all wrong.
Their smile is uncomfortable.
On Potsdam Square they stand in awe
Until run over by a car.
The poem’s tone embraces the coolly detached yet sardonic
contempt those in the city held for their fellow countrymen in
the provinces. Here Kästner distills the divide between urban and
rural populations which would play a key role in fueling the rise
of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP)—
otherwise known as the Nazi Party.
Of course, one need not have been born in Berlin to be a
Berliner. Czechoslovakian screenwriter, film critic and editor of
an influential journal The Literary World, Willy Haas gloried in his
adopted city: “[T]he fewest Berliners I knew were real Berliners
… to become a Berliner—that came quickly, if one only breathed
in the air of Berlin with deep breath.” Haas writes, “I loved the
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
7
CABARET
rapid, quick-witted reply of the Berlin woman above everything,
the keen, clear reaction of the Berlin audience in the theatre, in
the cabaret, on the street and in the café, that taking-nothingsolemnly yet taking-seriously of things, that lovely, dry, cool and
yet not cold atmosphere, the indescribable dynamic, the love
for work, enterprise, the readiness to take hard blows—and go
on living.”
A center for arts and experimentation Peter Gay’s monograph
documented Berlin’s electric and mercurial dynamism. He writes,
“Berlin was the headquarters for the political cabaret, where Otto
Reutter performed his own dry compositions, lampooning the
Germans for their rigidity in conduct and instability in politics,
where Paul Graetz and Trude Hesterberg sang Walter Mehring’s
satirical songs, and Claire Waldoff her proletarian ditties; Berlin
the center of political journalism, the biting commentary of
Carl von Ossietzky, Leopold Schwarzschild, and—usually
sent from abroad—Kurt Tucholsky; Berlin the stage for Erwin
Piscator’s experiment in political theatre; Berlin the scene of
Alfred Döblin’s most remarkable novel Berlin Alexanderplatz;
Berlin the best possible town for premieres of charming, trifling
films, sentimental Lehar operettas, and [Bertolt Brecht’s] Die
Dreigroschenoper; Berlin the city of publishing empires like
Mosse and Ullstein; Berlin the city of Samuel Fischer, the great
publisher, who had on his list Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse,
Gerhart Hauptmann, Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer, Alfred
Döblin, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Berlin was eminently the
city in which the outsider could make his home and extend
his talents.”
ELDORADO AS A CABARET AND LATER AN SA HEADQUARTERS
CARL ZUCKMAYER
gained formally equal rights under the Weimar constitution,
a growing number of middle-class as well as working-class
women in the 1920s were working outside the home in jobs
in the professions and in the service sector; a growing number
of (particularly young and single) women spent their leisure at
sports clubs and cinemas. Women thus constituted a more visible
presence in the public sphere and in the economy than they had
done before 1914 and 1918.” In her book This Is the New Woman
(1929), Elsa Herrmann concurs, noting “the woman of today is
oriented exclusively toward the present. That which is is decisive
for her, not that which should be or should have been according
to tradition.” In addition to women’s liberation, Berlin harbored
a vibrant sub-culture in which the city’s homosexual community
could thrive. Harvey writes, “In contrast both to the image of
Berlin as center of revolutionary art and bohemian lifestyles,
and the view of the city as the capital of commercialized massentertainment, the public authorities promoted a different vision
of the city as a progressive polity providing an efficient urban
infrastructure, combating social evils through appropriate welfare
intervention and encouraging a democratic culture based on
rational lifestyle balancing work, domesticity and healthy leisure
pursuits.”
BERTOLT BRECHT
Zuckmayer, a playwright and dramaturg who worked alongside
Brecht under Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, was
enthralled by the hope and potential projected onto the streets
and architecture of this modern metropolis. Recognizing that the
“city gobbled up talents and human energies with unexampled
appetite,” Zuckmayer gloried in the idea that Berlin “enticed
everyone.” And though the city teased and taunted and even
defeated many, Zuckmayer remarked that “Berlin tasted of the
future, and that is why we gladly took the crap and the coldness.”
Historian Elizabeth Harvey discusses Weimar-era Berlin as a site
for radical cultural change in the arts, but she also acknowledges
the city “was developing as a center of mass cultural production—
in journalism, film and fashion—and as a showcase for the latest
cultural imports from abroad.” More importantly, Berlin gave
birth to the Weimar “new woman.” Harvey notes “women had
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
It was this environment, socially and culturally progressive yet
politically and economically on the edge of collapse, which
enticed a young American writer, Christopher Isherwood, to live
8
CABARET
in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, keeping a detailed diary which
documented the sights and sounds of this thriving yet anxious
city. In his novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939), Isherwood articulated
his intent through the perspective of a central character
constructed from his own experiences: “I am a camera with its
shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording
the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the
kimono washing her hair. Some day, all of this will have to be
developed, carefully printed, fixed.” For scholar James Leve,
Goodbye to Berlin managed to “depict the horrors of a society
whose moral fabric is unraveling by focusing on the banality of
everyday life. In this way, the novel reveals as much about the
daily downward spiral of German society at the time as would
a political tome on the Third Reich.” Isherwood’s observations
in Weimar-era Berlin would provide enough raw material to
sustain a lifetime of writing, and Goodbye to Berlin, especially
the character of eccentric nightclub singer Sally Bowles, would
inspire a 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera – written by John
Van Druten and adapted for the screen in 1955 – and the 1966
Broadway musical Cabaret which was conceived and directed by
Hal Prince with a book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Fred Ebb and
music by John Kander. The musical would be adapted for the big
screen in 1972 by director/choreographer Bob Fosse.
PROSTITUTION REFORM DU
RING
THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC
I
n 1927 the Reichstag passed “Laws for Combating
Venereal Disease” – significant legislation which
served to decriminalize prostitution and abolish
state-enforced regulations which had subjected
prostitutes to compulsory medical exams, restrictions
on due process rights and other personal freedoms, and
police-controlled brothels. The law was considered a
major triumph for women’s rights activists seeking more
consistent institutional structures to provide necessary
social and health-related services while providing greater
agency for prostitutes to play an active role in the public
debate surrounding their profession. The law provided
free medical treatment for sexually transmitted diseases,
lifted the ban on advertisements and the public display of
contraceptives in shops, advocated for greater reproductive
rights and education, made it much easier for prostitutes
to rent private apartments in the neighborhood of their
choice, and crippled the power of the Sittenpolizei (or
Morals Police). Furthermore, while medical exams were
still required, women could choose their own doctors,
and in Berlin one could opt out of compulsory exams
altogether if they could prove they were disease free. In
1934, following the establishment of the Third Reich,
state-sanctioned and -run brothels returned.
NAZI STUDENTS BURNING BOOKS FROM THE INSTITUTE
FOR THE SCIENCE OF SEXUALITY – 1933
THE INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S UNION CONGRESS HELD IN BERLIN – 1929
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CABARET
T
THE RISE OF THE NATIONAL SOCIALIS
GERMAN WORKERS’ PARTY (NSDAP)
E
Consequently, in September 1930 the Nazi Party received 18.3%
of the Reichstag vote, second only to the Social Democratic Party,
yet the inability of the democratic parties to forge a competent
coalition government kept the Nazis in the limelight as the rising
voice of nationalist opposition to the Weimar Republic. In March
1932 Hitler unsuccessfully ran for President against conservative
incumbent Paul von Hindenburg, polling at 30.1% in the first round
and 36.8% in the second round. New elections in July 1932 saw the
Nazis win 37.4% of the vote while membership in the party rose to
400,000. To complicate matters, the German Communist Party won
14.6% of the national vote, and, since both parties were opposed
to each other and the existing institutional structures, a coalition
government was impossible. In January 1933, thinking a prominent
role in the Cabinet would soften Hitler’s extreme rhetoric and bridge
the growing political divide, President Hindenburg appointed Hitler
as Chancellor of the Reichstag Cabinet. On 27 February 1933
arsonists set fire to the Reichstag building, a Dutch communist was
arrested, and, as Chancellor, Hitler seized on the arrest as evidence
that communists were a viable threat to government stability. He
immediately urged Hindenburg to utilize Article 48 of the Weimar
constitution in order to dissolve the Reichstag and execute an
emergency decree to suspend all civil liberties and habeas corpus
rights—including freedom of expression, press and assembly—in
order to contain the menace. The “Reichstag Fire Decree” banned
the KDP and drove communists into exile while effectively silencing
social democrats and trade unionists. New elections in March 1933
did not see a Nazi majority (they received 43.9% of the Reichstag
vote), but the party was able to utilize democratic means to achieve
their desires. Passed by a broken Reichstag on 23 March 1933 (at
Berlin’s Kroll Opera House where Ernst Röhm’s Sturmabteilung
– the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party commonly referred to
as the SA – hovered over intimidated legislators) and signed by
President Hindenburg on the very same day, the “Enabling Act of
1933” amended the constitution to give the Reichstag Cabinet and,
by extension, Chancellor Adolph Hitler, the power to enact laws
without the need for official ratification by Reichstag legislators.
In essence, Hitler dissolved the German parliament for good,
eliminating all political parties and labor unions, and set himself
up as a de facto dictator. That same year Jews were excluded from
all forms of social service employment and the first concentration
camp was opened in Dachau. When President Hindenburg died in
August 1934, Hitler named himself Fürher of the newly emergent
Third Reich.
stablished in 1920 the NSDAP, otherwise known as
the Nazi Party, emerged out of German nationalist
resistance to the communist uprisings which partially
fueled the November Revolution. Adolph Hitler, a
decorated war hero, was named party leader in 1921.
Based in Bavaria and initially appealing to a rural
populace who feared urban workers would reap greater benefits
from the new Weimar government, the Nazi Party feared the
destabilization of traditional German values and denounced
liberal democratic ideals, women’s rights, and Jewish civil
liberties. They advocated for revoking the Treaty of Versailles
and blamed Jewish industrialists and businessmen for economic
despair, political instability, unemployment and Germany’s defeat
in World War I. A failed 1923 attempt to seize power in Munich
(the Beer Hall Putsch) led to Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment
where he wrote his manifesto Mein Kampf. Here Hitler
articulated his theory that all “true” Germans were part of an
Aryan superhuman race and that all others (Jews, Romani people,
Africans, homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) should be purged and eliminated to
maintain national purity. Although sentenced to five years, Hitler
was freed in 1924 after nine months. Mein Kampf would be
published in 1925.
The Nazi Party continued to grow in popularity but was not
considered a major threat to the Weimar government until 1930.
The party had achieved only 3% of the national Reichstag vote in
1924 and an even smaller 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Nevertheless,
by the end of 1928, the Nazis had accumulated approximately
60,000 members. Many historians suggest the forces unleashed
by the Wall Street Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the resulting
Great Depression in the United States and abroad exacerbated
an economic slowdown in Germany which had begun in 1928,
leading to job losses and business failures and providing the
necessary impetus for vigorous growth within both the Nazi Party
and the German Communist Party (KPD). German prosperity
between 1924 and 1928 had been financed by American
investments and loans. When American banks stopped the flow
of capital, unemployment began to soar. In 1929 the Weimar
government sought to counter the downturn by reducing social
services and public sector wages, cutting unemployment benefits
and increasing taxes. Such responses served to alienate, anger and
divide an anxious population.
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LOOKING FOR ISHERWOOD’S BERLIN
BY RACHEL B. DOYLE
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD AND W. H. AUDEN IN BERLIN – 1929
When Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929, the 25-year-old British
novelist could not quite bring himself to settle down in one place.
A
t one point he changed addresses three times in three
months. There was the room he could barely afford
next to the former Institute for Sexual Research
in leafy Tiergarten park. There was the cramped,
leaky attic flat that he shared with a family of five
in Kreuzberg. And there was the apartment around
Kottbusser Tor, in those days a slum (now a night-life hub),
where he was pleased to discover that he was the sole Englishman
when he went to register with the police.
“He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious
wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise
themselves in the dress and customs of its natives and die in
unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots,”
Isherwood wrote of this period in Christopher and His Kind, his
third-person memoir of the 1930s.
NOLLENDORFSTRASSE 17
In December 1930, Isherwood
finally settled into an apartment,
at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the
Schöneberg district. The building
was full of eccentrics who are now
known through their fictional
incarnations in novels like The Last
of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodbye
to Berlin (1939). He lived there
JEAN ROSS
with Jean Ross, the model for
his most famous character, the capricious nightclub singer and
aspiring actress Sally Bowles, who captivated him with her “air
of not caring a curse what people thought of her.” His landlady,
Meta Thurau, inspired the character of Fräulein Schroeder, who,
in Isherwood’s fiction, symbolized the typical Berliner of the time.
In dire economic straits after World War I, and forced to take in
lodgers, she was at first skeptical of Hitler. Eventually she adapted
Isherwood would not feel out of place in Berlin today, which is
still a destination for the young and the creative. While fashions
may have changed, Isherwood’s work still captures the essence
of the German capital, with its art collections stashed in former
bunkers, and louche nightclubs hiding behind unmarked doors.
The seductive excitement of Weimar-era Berlin—with its
limitless sexual possibilities for the curious gay writer and parties
where dancers “swayed in partial-paralytic rhythms under a
huge sunshade suspended from the ceiling”—quickly inspired
Isherwood. He steeped himself in the sordid and the refined, the
red-light bars and the villas, the decadence and the apprehension
of a city whose freewheeling spirit was about to be extinguished
by Nazi terror. “Here was the seething brew of history in the
making,” the author wrote in his memoir.
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
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CABARET
to popular sentiment, in which locals “thrilled with a furtive,
sensual pleasure, like school-boys, because the Jews, their business
rivals, and the Marxists … had been satisfactorily found guilty of
the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it.”
FROM ISHERWOOD’S NOVEL
GOODBYE TO BERLIN
The street Isherwood called home for two and a half years was
bombed during World War II, and now the stately prewar
buildings—including the one where he lived, with its pale yellow
facade mounted with concrete lion heads—are mixed with
uninspiring modern constructions. A fetish fashion workshop and
a rare-book store share the ground floor of his former building;
across the street, visitors can choose between a kabbalah center
and a speakeasy-style cocktail bar, Stagger Lee, where one rings a
brass doorbell to enter. Around the corner there is a six-monthold 1920s-themed cafe with musical performances named after
Sally Bowles.
From the chapter “Sally Bowles” in
Goodbye to Berlin on a performance the
title character delivers at the fictional
cabaret The Lady Windermere:
I was curious to see how Sally would behave. I had
imagined her, for some reason, rather nervous, but she
wasn’t, in the least. She had a surprisingly deep husky
voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her
hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance
was, in its own way, effective because of her startling
appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people
thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a
take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face, she sang:
Still, Nollendorfstrasse doesn’t seem all that different from how
the author described it in the opening lines of Goodbye to Berlin:
“From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops
where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy
balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street
leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes
crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture
of a bankrupt middle class.”
Now I know why Mother
Told me to be true;
She meant me for Someone
Exactly like you.
The neighborhood, in the days when Isherwood was giving
English lessons and writing wry, detached stories in a front room
of his apartment, was a thriving center of gay life, and remains
so. Today it is not uncommon to see men in leather pants or
shiny rubber boots or police costumes strolling around—there are
numerous shops selling just these items, and a handful of clubs
where one is not allowed in unless one is clad in them.
There was really quite a lot of applause. The pianist, a
handsome young man with blond wavy hair, stood up and
solemnly kissed Sally’s hand. Then she sang two more
songs, one in French and the other in German. These
weren’t so well received. (25)
Isherwood immersed himself in the area’s night life; it provided
fodder for the novel Goodbye to Berlin, which was adapted into
the 1966 musical and 1972 film Cabaret. His apartment was a
short distance from several iconic clubs, including the Eldorado,
known for its transvestite shows. There, customers could buy
tokens to exchange for dances with men and women in drag, then
try to guess their partners’ gender. Masks were available for those
who wished to protect their identities.
And then there was a big dancing-hall with telephones
on the tables. We had the usual kind of conversations”
‘Pardon me, Madame, I feel sure from your voice that
you’re a fascinating little blonde with long black
eyelashes—just my type. How did I know? Aha, that’s
my secret! Yes—quite right: I’m tall, dark, broadshouldered, military appearance, and the tiniest little
moustache . . . You don’t believe me? Then come and see
for yourself!’ The couples were dancing with hands on
each other’s hips, yelling in each other’s faces, streaming
with sweat. An orchestra in Bavarian costume whooped
and drank and perspired beer. The place stank like a zoo.
After this, I think I strayed off alone and wandered for
hours and hours through a jungle of paper streamers.
Next morning, when I woke, the bed was full of them. (36)
“He probably saw Marlene here,” said Brendan Nash, a
transplanted Londoner who gives “Isherwood’s Neighborhood”
tours. He was referring to Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous
actress born and raised in the Schöneberg district. On a sunny
summer morning we were standing in front of an organic
supermarket on Motzstrasse 24, where a sign read “Speisekammer
im Eldorado” (“Pantry in the Eldorado”), acknowledging that the
room where transvestite performers once shimmied on stage is
currently dedicated to vegetables.
We went inside to inspect a small photo gallery next to the cash
register that showed how the nightclub used to look—a two-story
space with gilded ceilings, chandeliers, white tablecloths and art
on the walls. Mr. Nash, who began giving the tour in 2011, said
it was considered chic in Weimar-era heterosexual circles to spend
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
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CABARET
the evening there, just as tourists today line up to dance with
the shirtless leather daddies at the techno temple Berghain in
Friedrichshain.
FROM ISHERWOOD’S NOVEL
GOODBYE TO BERLIN
In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood drolly described Berlin’s
“dens of pseudo-vice”: “Here, screaming boys in drag and monocled,
Eton-cropped girls in dinner-jackets play-acted the high jinks of
Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them
that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.”
We talked continuously about wealth, fame, huge
contracts for Sally, record-breaking sales for the novels
I should one day write. ‘I think,’ said Sally, ‘it must be
marvelous to be a novelist. You’re frightfully dreamy and
unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they
can fairly swindle you as much as they want—and then
you sit down and write a book about them which fairly
shows them what swine they all are, and it’s the most
terrific success and you make pots of money.’ (44)
Many of the author’s main sources of inspiration were the seedy
“boy bars” that he frequented in a canalside area of Kreuzberg,
especially one called the Cosy Corner, on Zossener Strasse 7,
which became a model for the Alexander Casino in Goodbye
to Berlin. Today, that address is next to a small piano shop
and close to charming businesses like Knopf Paul, which sells
buttons, including ones made from eucalyptus and deer horn,
and a pharmacy called Zum Goldenen Einhorn (To the Golden
Unicorn) with wooden cabinets and porcelain jars.
Yet in Isherwood’s fiction, the area was a notorious place where
the police regularly hunted for “wanted criminals or escaped
reformatory boys.” Thrill-seeking visitors flocked there on
weekends. “They discussed communism and Van Gogh and
the best restaurants. Some of them seemed a little scared:
perhaps they expected to be knifed in this den of thieves,” the
author wrote.
‘But seriously, I believe I’m a sort of Ideal Woman, if
you know what I mean. I’m the sort of woman who can
take men away from their wives, but I could never keep
anybody for long. And that’s because I’m the type which
every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then
he finds he doesn’t really, after all.’ (50)
Isherwood’s genius was in fusing the private, often outré lives of
the Berliners, with the political events unfurling like a blood-red
banner. The brownshirts carrying the swastika flag put an end to
much of the scene that defined his time in the city and hastened
his departure.
On Fräulein Schroeder (Isherwood’s
landlady who would be transformed into
Fräulein Schneider in Cabaret) from the
chapter “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932–3)”:
“Boy bars of every sort were being raided, now, and many were
shut down. ... No doubt the prudent ones were scared and lying
low, while the silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how
sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms,” Isherwood
wrote in Christopher and His Kind.
It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics.
Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself
to every new régime. This morning I even heard her
talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife.
If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last
November, she voted communist, she would probably
deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely
acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law,
like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.
Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing
themselves. After all, whatever government is in power,
they are doomed to live in this town. (206–7)
In May of 1933 the author left Berlin for several years of roving
around Europe with his draft-evading German boyfriend, Heinz
Neddermeyer. He returned to visit in 1952 between the war
and the Wall, finding “smashed buildings along that familiar
street”—Nollendorfstrasse—and “house-fronts ... pitted by bomb
fragments and eaten by decay.” He never saw the city restored to
the familiar, welcoming and inspiring place he would likely find
it today.
Isherwood settled in Southern California in 1939, but remained
both exhilarated and haunted by his time in the German capital.
“Always in the background was Berlin. It was calling me every
night, and its voice was the harsh sexy voice of the gramophone
records,” he wrote in the 1962 novel, Down There on a Visit.
“Berlin had affected me like a party at the end of which I didn’t
want to go home.”
RACHEL B. DOYLE, “LOOKING FOR ISHERWOOD’S BERLIN,” NEW YORK TIMES,
APRIL 12, 2013.
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
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CABARET
ORIGINS OF A MUSICAL:
HAL PRINCE AND CABARET
Harold Prince was not the only theatre artist to imagine Isherwood’s stories
of Berlin as the foundation for a Broadway musical.
D
uring the early 1960s lyricist Sheldon Harnick
(Fiorello!, She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof) expressed
interest in a musical adaptation of John Van Druten’s
I Am a Camera, and actresses Gwen Verdon and
Tammy Lee Grimes were circling around the Sally
Bowles character as a possible Broadway stage siren.
Producer David Black was the first to obtain the rights to the
material and commissioned Sandy Wilson (The Boyfriend) to write
the book, lyrics and music for rising star Julie Andrews. Prince
was asked to meet with Wilson and listen to the score but found
the music too cheery and derivative. Still, Prince was drawn to the
material. In his autobiography Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six
Years in the Theatre (1974) Prince remembers being less interested
in Sally Bowles than he was in drawing a “parallel between the
spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in
the 1960s.” He had been deeply affected by civil rights conflicts
in America and the social and cultural uncertainty that reflected
a nation divided. Frustrated by the assassination of Medgar Evers
in 1963, the 1964 murder of the three civil rights workers by the
Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, and the march on Selma, Alabama
in 1965, Prince wanted to develop a musical that responded
to the historical moment by utilizing the past, envisioning
Weimar Germany as an allegorical space through which he could
comment upon the social inequalities and troubling violence
which shaped American cultural discourse in the 1960s.
HAL PRINCE
JOE MASTEROFF
entitled Divorce Me, Darling! In 1963 Prince commissioned Joe
Masteroff (She Loves Me) to write the first draft of a book based
on Isherwood’s stories, and selected lyricist Fred Ebb, composer
John Kander and choreographer Ron Field to fill out the creative
team. Masteroff came up with the show’s title and the concept
of the cabaret as a metaphor for Germany’s declining democratic
values. Initially, the team sought to juxtapose two separate
scores, one for the book characters and the other as pastiche for
the cabaret entertainers. “But who were to be the entertainers?”
Prince asked. “Then I remembered when I was stationed with
the army near Stuttgart in 1951, there was this nightclub called
Maxim’s in the rubble of an old church basement. There was a
dwarf MC, hair parted in the middle and lacquered down with
brilliantine, his mouth made into a bright-red cupid’s bow, who
wore heavy false eyelashes and sang, danced, goosed, tickled, and
pawed four lumpen Valkyres waving diaphanous butterfly wings.”
The memory proved to be too irresistible and the character
After much negotiation with Black, Prince secured the rights
to the material, Julie Andrews went off to film Disney’s Mary
Poppins, and Wilson developed a sequel to The Boyfriend
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
JOHN KANDER AND
FRED EBB
14
CABARET
of the Emcee was born. Once Joel Grey signed on to play the
role, Masteroff, Kander and Ebb began to incorporate the new
character more fully into the dramatic action. Cabaret’s structure
was altered to enable numbers performed in the Kit Kat Klub to
comment upon the more traditional book scenes which preceded
them, allowing the venue to absorb and reflect the insidious
creep of Nazi ideology. For Prince, the Emcee “starts out as a
pathetic, self-deluded entertainer who gradually turns into an
emblem of the Nazi mentality.” For Prince’s biographer Foster
Hirsch, the character is a sinister and “cocky lord of misrule.”
For Keith Garebian, author of The Making of Cabaret (2011), the
Emcee “introduces, interrupts, participates in, and extends the
meanings of the songs and the club’s novelty acts while exhorting
the clientele to sit back, forget their troubles, and enjoy the
deliberately lewd performances.”
JILL HAWORTH AS SALLY AND BERT CONVY AS CLIFF
Because musical theatre conventions of the day called for a
primary love story and a romantic subplot, Masteroff adapted the
content of Isherwood’s stories in order to provide a heterosexual
relationship between Sally Bowles and the American writer now
named Clifford Bradshaw. He also added a subplot involving
Cliff’s landlady (now Fräulein Schneider) and an invented
character, an elderly Jewish fruit shop proprietor named Rudy
Schultz. Contrary to musical theatre conventions, however, both
relationships fail as the characters’ desire for personal intimacy
succumbs to the growing apathy and nihilism closing in around
them. This was quite radical in a period dominated by Rodgers
and Hammerstein’s seamlessly integrated shows which embraced
the spirit of American optimism. Musicologist Mitchell Morris
agrees, “With its seedy characters in louche entanglements, luridly
placed against the scene of a declining Weimar Republic and a
rising Nazi Party, the show seemed to violate many of the most
central conventions of the musical during its post-World War
II heyday.” Garebian concurs, acknowledging that Prince and
his creative team took huge risks with the show, walking a fine
line by “selling spectacles of the trashy and the sophisticated,
of soft sentimentality and hard barbarism, of cold exploitation
and warm vulnerability.” Furthermore, scenic designer Boris
Aronson incorporated a large distortion mirror hovering over the
stage which functioned to situate the audience directly into the
mise-en-scène. John Bush Jones writes, “When audiences entered
the theatre they saw themselves, hugely, somewhat grotesquely,
reflected in that giant mirror. When the mirror returned at the
end, they were left to stare at themselves again. The message was
both ‘It can happen here’ and it will happen here unless we keep
our eyes open.”
LOTTE LENYA AS FRÄULEIN SCHNEIDER
AND JACK GILFORD AS HERR SCHULTZ
Walter Kerr was not fond of Haworth’s Sally Bowles (finding her
performance “trim but neutral, a profile instead of a person”),
but he was quite effusive about the show’s highly conceptual
theatricality. Though it trafficked in salacious, bump-and-grind
choreography and included jarring anti-Semitic remarks and an
abortion plot point, Kerr noted Cabaret “has elected to wrap its
arms around all that was troubling and all that was intolerable
with a demonic grin, an insidious slink, and the painted-on
charm that keeps revelers up until midnight making false faces
at the hangman.” The songs “snatch up the melodic desperation
of an era and make new, sprightly, high-voltage energy out of it”
and the production’s style was “driven like glistening nails into
the musical numbers.” In 1967 Cabaret was nominated for eleven
Tony Awards and won eight statuettes, including Best Musical,
Best Original Score, Best Director, Best Choreography and Best
Scenic Design.
Cabaret opened on November 20, 1966 at the Broadhurst
Theatre, transferring to two additional Broadway houses before
closing after three years and a run of 1,165 performances. In
addition to Joel Grey as the Emcee, the show starred Jill Haworth
as Sally, Bert Convy as Cliff, the inimitable Lotte Lenya as
Fräulein Schneider and Jack Gilford as Herr Schultz. Critical
reception was very positive though the musical’s dark subject
matter and unique dramaturgical structure was challenging.
Women’s Wear Daily critic Martin Gottfried, for example, was
unable to reconcile the all too familiar book scenes from the
“striking uses of lighting and movement” which set the world of
the Kit Kat Klub in sharp relief. Writing for the New York Times,
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
CABARET SHOW POSTER
In conclusion, Cabaret was most certainly a groundbreaking and
influential experiment in dramatic form. James Leve concurs,
“With its interweaving of plot and commentary, book scenes
and cabaret revue, political history and cultural critique, Cabaret
showed an entire generation of writers a new brand of musical
theatre, one flexible enough to respond to the concerns of a
nation in transition.”
15
CABARET
ANATOMY OF A SCENE
ALAN CUMMING AS EMCEE IN SAM MENDES’ 1998 PRODUCTION
Discussing the formal characteristics of the American musical, Mitchell Morris acknowledges
the “matrix of commercial necessities” which require new productions to move away from the
original, adapting to and privileging new audiences and emerging theatre artists.
S
revival certainly opens up new modes of spectatorial engagement,
but they also provide an opportunity to reconfigure “canonical”
texts for new audiences. Bruce Kirle’s argument that musicals
are inherently incomplete texts open to revision and reappraisal
and speaking to shifting ideological forces as they move through
time is central to this idea. In particular, Kirle questions what
exactly constitutes an authoritative production of a Broadway
musical. He suggests the concept “of the ‘definitive,’ closed
performance … is a result of the marketing of original Broadway
cast recordings beginning in the 1940s. When these ‘authentic’
cast albums first emerged, ‘definitive’ performances were recorded
for posterity and subsequent studio recordings were denigrated
as inauthentic. With the passage of time and the popularity of
revivals on Broadway, however, other ‘definitive’ performances
of these same musicals have been recorded. … [T]here can be
no definitive production of a musical apart from a given cultural
moment and that, consequently, the texts of musicals are in
themselves necessarily incomplete. … Rather than closed, the
texts become unfinished, because the characters must be played to
conform to changing societal conventions and audience tastes.”
uch an approach often results in revised dialogue and
song selection and positions the musical as a uniquely
open and malleable text. Morris argues revivals and
dramturgical revisions constitute a complicated yet
integral part of the American musical theatre tradition.
He writes, “Attributes such as these indicate a general
assumption that the historical location of a musical—not simply
its place in the chronological sequence—is an important aspect
of its framing.” The idea of the musical as an ever-evolving text
not limited by its sequential place in the canon but framed by any
given historical moment is certainly a compelling one.
Musical theatre is the backbone of Broadway and accounts for
the majority of box office receipts and profits. Here art and
commerce intermingle, and, as Stacy Wolf has written, despite
“their unapologetic commercialism … musicals have achieved
supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not
more than any other art form in America”. Writing for Time
Richard Corliss notes, “Revivals are to Broadway what sequels are
to Hollywood: a way to mint money from familiar materials.” The
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
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CABARET
Such an approach is not surprising in a capitalist economy as
the Broadway revival is a unique commodity which functions to
maintain the brand of the artists involved, sell cast recordings
and other merchandise, keep the songbook alive, license touring
companies and regional productions, and allow the project to be
commercially viable by addressing social, cultural and political
concerns deemed less problematic in the past. If that requires
rewrites and revisions so be it.
Following the success of the 1966 production of Cabaret,
subsequent Broadway revivals in 1987 and 1998 worked to
update, rework and rewrite the text. Hal Prince has acknowledged
major artistic concessions were made in 1966. He recalls that
Isherwood’s stories were “about Sally Bowles’s ‘scandalous’
relationship with a homosexual writer. Plotless, really, there are
events along the way, but essentially they are a pair of character
studies with ominous presentiments of anti-Semitism just offstage
in the wings. We persuaded ourselves that the musical comedy
audience required a sentimental heterosexual love story with a
beginning, middle, and end to make the concept palatable. In
my opinion we were wrong. The plotless musical might not have
worked, but had it, the whole project would have been consistent
with its aspirations. If we had Cabaret to do all over again, I
believe we would have made the audacious choice. In defense, it
was 1966. A lot has happened since then.” Prince would indeed
return to the material in 1987 giving Joel Grey top billing as the
Emcee and asking Masteroff to rewrite the book, introducing
the characters of gay Kit Kat boys Bobby and Victor, reshaping
Cliff’s character as bisexual and conflicted, dousing the Emcee’s
naughty charm with a more chilly, less seductive demeanor and
providing Sally with a tougher exterior, more knowing and less
eccentric and naive. Songs were cut, a new song was written and
another song originally cut from the 1966 production was added.
In a period marked by global terrorism, the AIDS epidemic and
Reaganomics, Prince had been awakened by his own indifference
toward a homeless man during a New York City snowstorm.
He had looked the other way and felt complicit in his inability
to engage. This was the context in which he would return to
Cabaret (the first and only time he would revive one of his own
productions). Running for 261 performances, however, Prince’s
revival was unable to make an impact with its audience.
JOEL GREY AS THE EMCEE IN HAL PRINCE’S 1987 PRODUCTION
is very much of his making. He’s down and dirty. He’s come up
from the streets and he brings the streets with him.” According
to Cumming he played the Emcee as a “drug addict. You can
see the track marks on his body from the drugs. And as the play
progresses, with the rise of fascism, the Emcee gets more and
more debauched.” The audience no longer watched the show from
a comfortable distance but were fully immersed as patrons in the
tawdry environs of the cabaret. Opening on Broadway in 1998
and playing at the newly restored, legendary nightclub Studio 54,
the Mendes’ production (now choreographed and co-directed by
Rob Marshall) ran for six years and 2,377 performances, the third
longest-running revival in Broadway musical history.
One way to approach each revival of Cabaret is to narrow in on a
close reading of a Act I, Scene 10. Here, rewrites and the use of
three separate songs articulate the show’s creative evolution over
a 30-year period. As in all productions the scene takes place some
four months after Sally has permanently moved into Cliff’s rooms
in Fräulein Schneider’s boarding house. The 1966 stage directions
read, “SALLY’s things are everywhere – on the floor, bulging
out of the drawers, peeking out of the closets.” Beguiled by his
exciting social life in Berlin, Cliff is unable to write and Sally
worries she is a distraction.
CLIFF: Distracting? Nonsense! What about Venice? What
about Rome? There was no Sally Bowles then – and no novel
either. I was just drifting …
SALLY: And now you’re sleepwalking. Is that better?
CLIFF: Sleepwalking? Who said that?
SALLY: You did. Last night
CLIFF: I was drunk last night. Anyway – I said it was
possible I was sleepwalking. And – if I am – who cares?
What’s the point in opening my eyes?
Cliff then begins to sing “Why Should I Wake Up?” suggesting
that he too is walking through the streets, parlors and nightclubs
In 1993, Cabaret underwent further transformation with
new orchestrations by Michael Gibson and more revisions to
Masteroff’s book. Directed by Sam Mendes at London’s Donmar
Warehouse, this new version heightened the show’s polymorphous
perversity, cutting and reimagining songs from the original
1966 production while adding two songs written for the 1972
film directed by Bob Fosse (one of which was previously written
for an unproduced Kander and Ebb musical Golden Gate).
Mendes literally set his production in a nightclub, roughing
up the material and stripping away all hints of glamour and
sophistication. All of the characters were allowed their sexuality,
and all the musical instruments were played by the Kit Kat Klub
boys and girls. Mendes shifted the perspective; it would be the
club which enacted the book scenes rather than, in his words,
“a story which contains within it a club.” Alan Cumming, who
played the Emcee, described his character as “the overseer of the
whole show and not just the club. The atmosphere of the evening
THEATER LATTÉ DA AND HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
17
CABARET
of Berlin as if in a euphoric dream. Kander and Ebb wrote 47
songs during the development of the musical and made many
efforts to write for Cliff, yet by the time Cabaret premiered the
character was left with a single love ballad, a nod to traditional
musical theatre conventions. Noting that the melody is
“sickeningly sentimental,” Keith Garebian writes, “The soaring
notes of the ballad, especially on the title line and the couplet
at the end of each release, reveal a character who is incongruous
with the one projected in either Isherwood or Van Druten, for
gone is the shy, reticent, but sharply intelligent witness to life,
and in his place is a Broadway romantic who is quite gratified in
being under a woman’s spell.” Shortly after the song concludes,
Sally casually announces her pregnancy and Cliff becomes more
determined to be a responsible man. It is a crucial turning point
in the plot, yet the tone of the scene is far too effervescent.
In the 1987 revival the scene provides greater emotional tension
as the couple are discovered bickering. More explicitly bisexual,
Cliff had been out partying the night before without Sally
and gave his phone number to a young man, Gottfried von
Schwarzenbaum, who has been calling the flat all day. Feeling
restless and afraid her pregnancy will further complicate matters,
Sally decides to pack her bags and leave, forcing Cliff to launch
into the soaring love ballad “Don’t Go.” The song is sweetly
sentimental, but underneath the surface lurks a heightened sense
of vulnerability. Singing with a clarity and directness, Cliff pleads
with Sally to stay:
To you I’m just another face,
A warm convenient place,
A casual romance;
But to me you’re more than just a girl,
You are the only girl,
Don’t take away this chance.
NATASHA RICHARDSON AS SALLY BOWLES IN SAM MENDES’ 1998 PRODUCTION
seductive – so no man can resist me,” she declares. “Not even
a rather strange, handsome young American, who allows me
to share his room – and his bed – and falls desperately in love
with me … (He turns his head away from her) Don’t worry! It’s
only fiction!” The scene incorporates the content of “Don’t Go”
into the dialogue, but it is Sally who will sing in this iteration.
Pregnant, uncertain if Cliff is even the father and seriously
pondering another abortion, Sally sings the melancholy torch
song “Maybe This Time” as if standing on a stage outside the
boundaries of the boarding house. She wonders if it is at all
possible that she could win for once, settle down and love and
be loved in return. Still, the mood of the song suggest a brittle
world-weariness which belies the confidence embedded within
the lyrics. And Cliff’s inchoate presence – there yet not fully there
– serves to underscore the theatrical ambiguity. The idea that
the book scenes’ romantic entanglements are being conjured up
within the liminal space of the Kit Kat Klub is clearly articulated
in this moment. As musical theatre historian Raymond Knapp
argues, “the cabaret is both an escape from life and the only
place where one can truly live. Implicitly, part of the appeal of
the cabaret is that it is a constructed reality, seemingly under
the control of the actors. But escaping to the cabaret, so as to
construct an alternative fantasy world, involves renouncing the
capacity to wield constructive control in the outside world, which
can then only be criticized, and only at the indulgence of that
world. The feeling of control offered within the world of the
cabaret is in the end illusory. By the end of the show, we have
been well prepared to realize this, and to understand both why
Sally Bowles has retreated/escaped to that world, and why she is
thus doomed.”
No, I can’t wish you luck
As you’re walking away, please stay.
Sally, stay … Sally, stay.
You may think I’ll be glad if von Schwarzenbaum calls,
But that’s not so.
Don’t go, Sally, don’t go.
Although, the song can be played straight, the tension between
Cliff’s desire for a “normal” life and his sexual attraction to men
suggests the character is performing heterosexuality as much as
anything else. Garebian agrees, arguing the ballad to be propelled
by a “plea of mounting desperation.” And, after the song, when
Sally decides to remain with Cliff and announces her pregnancy,
both characters’ motivations are far more complexly layered.
In the 1998 revival Cliff no longer sings a solo, and Kander and
Ebb biographer James Leve makes the case that Cliff’s “musical
silence is wrapped up with his ambiguous sexual identity.”
Leve writes, “Amidst the ubiquitous camp of this production,
Cliff finally becomes the objective camera lens observing those
around him, not unlike what the original writer in Isherwood’s
novel professed to be.” The scene this time begins with a more
ominous note: “It is rather dark in CLIFF’S room, SALLY is
sitting alone – drinking. A bottle of gin is nearby. CLIFF enters,
opening a letter.” Sally is playfully mordant, encouraging Cliff to
write a novel about her. “But make me ravishing and sublimely
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FOR FURTHER READING
Keith Garebian, The Making of Cabaret, 2nd edition (Oxford &
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York:
Harper & Row, 1968).
Foster Hirsch, Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre,
Revised edition (New York: Applause, 2005).
Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (New York: New
Directions, 2008).
Mary Fulbrook, ed. Twentieth-Century Germany: Politics,
Culture & Society, 1918-1990 (London: Arnold, 2001).
John Bush Jones. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the
American Musical Theatre (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis UP, 2003).
Bruce Kirle, Unfinished Business: Broadway Musicals as Works-InProcess (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005).
Raymond Knapp, Mitchell Morris, Stacy Wolf, The Oxford
Handbook of The American Musical (Oxford & New York: Oxford
UP, 2011).
Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of
Personal Identity (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006).
Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of
National Identity (Princeton, Princeton UP, 2005).
James Leve, Kander and Ebb (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009).
Joe Masteroff, John Kander, Fred Ebb. Cabaret: The Illustrated
Book and Lyrics (New York: Newmarket Press, 1999).
Anthony McElligott, The Short Oxford History of Germany:
Weimar Germany (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2009).
Robert G. Moeller, ed. The Nazi State and German Society: A Brief
History with Documents (Boston: Bedford, 2010).
Hal Prince, Contradictions: Notes on Twenty-Six Years in the
Theatre (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1974).
Sabine Rewald, ed. Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the
1920s (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006).
Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway
Musical (Oxford & New York: Oxford UP, 2011).
TYLER MICHAELS (THE EMCEE) PHOTO BY TOM SANDELANDS
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ABOUT THE PRODUCERS
THEATER LATTÉ DA
HENNEPIN THEATRE TRUST
Founded by Peter Rothstein and Denise Prosek, Theater Latté
Da is now entering its 16th year of combining music and
story to illuminate the breadth of the human condition. Peter
and Denise began their successful collaboration in 1994 by
privately producing five original cabarets to showcase Twin
Cities talent. They discovered that by placing equal emphasis
on music and storytelling, they could weave tapestries of
engaging, challenging and often surprising narratives that
resonated with people on many levels. Theater Latté Da
officially incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1998 and
to this day remains committed to a rigorous experimentation
with music and story that expands the art form and speaks
to a contemporary audience challenging us to think deeply
about the world in which we live. The venues we perform
in are an integral part of our productions. In 1998, Theater
Latté Da began performing at the intimate 120-seat Loring
Playhouse. By 2007, Theater Latté Da productions were
playing to sold-out houses. At this time, we began searching
for spaces with different performance configurations to
meet the unique needs of our productions. Since 2007,
Theater Latté Da has produced shows at the Guthrie Theater,
Ordway, Pantages Theatre, Southern Theater, History Theatre,
Fitzgerald Theater, the Rarig Center Stoll Thrust Theatre
and The Lab Theater. Theater Latté Da is now emerging as a
leader in the musical theater art form, having produced over
50 mainstage productions including nine world premieres, six
area premieres and dozens of productions celebrated for their
bold re-imagination.
Owner of the historic Orpheum, State, Pantages and New
Century Theatres, is an independent, non-profit organization
dedicated to arts-inspired community cultural development.
We achieve our mission by presenting a rich mix of live
performances, creating inspiring arts education experiences and
advancing a thriving Hennepin Cultural District in downtown
Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Trust’s activities include
presenting Broadway touring productions and the related
Broadway Confidential series, concerts, comedy, speakers
and other variety entertainment plus educational initiatives
including our SpotLight Musical Theatre and SpotLight Critical
Review programs for high schools, Teen Ushers, the Access
Program and Family Day events.
For more information about Hennepin Theatre Trust, visit
HennepinTheatreTrust.org.
For more information about Theater Latté Da, visit
LatteDa.org.
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