![]() The whole place became a cabaret, with a whole world and life happening simultaneously.”ġ966: “Cabaret,” a musical loosely based on “I Am a Camera” and “The Berlin Stories,” opens at the Broadhurst Theatre, directed by Harold Prince with a book by Joe Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb. And it was this wonderful, unique collaboration, which turned out to be a great experience for both of us. “Sam had never done a show on Broadway I was directing for the first time on Broadway. “We turned to each other and said, ‘It seems like it’s fate, why don’t we co-direct this and bring both of our sensibilities,’” Marshall says. Instead of clashing, the two directors decided to work together. And we looked for years, and Sam went on to other things.”Īfter Mendes bowed out, Haimes asked Marshall, who had choreographed Roundabout’s “She Loves Me,” to direct and choreograph the production he agreed. It couldn’t have any poles or anything in the audience. We tried finding a 500-seat cabaret space in Manhattan. ![]() “It was complete insanity,” says Haimes, who relates the travails he endured to produce “Cabaret” with humor and relish. He disguised the truth in a murkily doomed romance between the narrator and Sally. Isherwood was gay, but while he was writing “The Berlin Stories” in 1930s and 1940s he couldn’t very well admit that. Needy, untalented, reckless, manipulative - but highly entertaining - she may be the model for the movie stereotype film critic Nathan Rabin dubbed the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Sally, although she plays a relatively minor role in “The Berlin Stories,” seized readers’ imagination from the outset. “It was the end of the world … and I was dancing with Sally Bowles and we were both fast asleep.” The offbeat vagabonds the narrator meets are lost in hedonistic pursuits, oblivious to the horror massing on the horizon: “There was a cabaret and there was a master of ceremonies and there was a city called Berlin in a country called Germany,” the narrator writes. ![]() It’s the last gasp of the permissive, decadent Weimar Republic the Nazis are consolidating power, but nobody is paying attention. His narrator, a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, is an expatriate writer in Berlin in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The English writer Christopher Isherwood published “The Berlin Stories,” the semi-autobiographical collection that served as the source for “Cabaret,” in 1945. We can track America’s attitude toward homosexuality, for example, through the progressive outing of the “Cabaret” male lead, from reluctant straight man back in 1966 to unambiguous - if closeted - gay man today. As a result, the musical’s evolution can be seen as a mirror of American society over the last half-century: what has changed and what hasn’t. Successive interpretations of “Cabaret” followed suit, with each new iteration both reflecting and disrupting a distinct cultural moment. Harold Prince, who conceived and directed the original production, created a startlingly innovative piece of theater that also, inevitably, was a product of its time. (More on that later.) The salient fact is that nearly 50 years have passed since Joel Grey first sang “Willkommen” in 1966.įifty years, in the scope of theatrical history, is an eye blink - “Cabaret” is a baby next to, say, Greek tragedy - but the pace of progress has sped up since 1966. It comes with a slightly complicated provenance: This “Cabaret” is the national tour of Roundabout Theater Company’s 2014 Broadway revival, which itself was a remounting of Roundabout’s Tony-winning 1998 Broadway revival. The musical “Cabaret” will turn 50 this year, and its latest incarnation opens Wednesday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.
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