My new YouTube series examines the musical legacy of John Kander and Fred Ebb. Watch on YouTube, or, if you’d prefer, read my script below.
Intro
Wilkomenn to the second installment of my ranking of every Kander & Ebb musical based on listening to the original broadway cast album. Today we’re talking about Cabaret from 1966. Not the Bob Fosse-directed movie with Liza Minnelli, not the Sam Mendes gritty 90s revival starring Alan Cumming and not the Rebecca Frecknall-directed revival that has been running for five years on the West End. All of those versions influence what the popular conception of Cabaret as a musical is, so much so that the original production rarely gets discussed anymore. I want to talk about why that is and what it was about this piece that has made it one of the iconic musicals of all time.
Context
Cabaret opened on Broadway in November 1966 at the Broadhurst Theatre and it closed in 1969 after running 1,166 performances and 21 previews. It was a huge hit. I don’t think people remember that, but it was a huge hit and it swept the 1967 Tonys, winning 8 awards including Best Musical and the first Original Score win for Kander & Ebb.
It’s the story of an American writer, Cliff Bradshaw, who comes to Berlin at the end of 1929 looking for inspiration and finds it in the vivacious nightclub singer Sally Bowles. A secondary plot sees Cliff’s landlady falling in love with a Jewish shopkeeper. Both couples face challenges as it becomes more and more apparent that the Nazi party is rising to power. The whole show is presided over by a crude and enigmatic Master of Ceremonies.
Hal Prince directed and produced. Joe Masteroff wrote the book, based on a John Van Druten play that was an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Prince won the first of his 8 Tonys for Best Director. Someone else who won a Tony for their work on this show was legendary designer Boris Aronson, whose set was kind of integral to Prince’s staging. A larger mirror hung over the stage, pointed at the audience but with the image distorted.
It starred, and this is the order in which they were billed in the playbill, Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles, Jack Gilford as the shopkeeper Herr Schultz, Bert Convy as Cliff, and Lotte Lenya as the landlady Faurlien Schneider. And then, in a separate billing block underneath that, you get Joel Grey as the Emcee, Peg Murray as Fraulein Kost, and Edward Winter as Ernst, all 3 of whom were nominated for their performances and Grey and Murray won. Grey as the Emcee was the breakout character of the show, and it would become the signature role of his career, so that Tony win doesn’t surprise me, but that Fraulein Kost is a Tony winning role does surprise me because it’s such a small part. What did Peg Murray bring to it, I wonder? The only song she sings, the reprise of Tomorrow Belongs to Me that ends Act One, unfortunately is not on the cast album.
Lenya and Gilford were also nominated for Tonys, in the leading categories. Those aren’t the roles you think of as the stars of this show, and I think this speaks to some of the ways that narrative works against itself.
But before we get to the problems I have with this show, we need to first talk about why Cabaret is credited with changing the American musical forever. To do that, we must define a term. A “concept musical,” per the definition James Leve uses in his 2009 book about Kander & Ebb, is a musical where “the music, lyrics, book, set, and costumes are conceived not individually but as a whole in order to articulate the theme or metaphor of a musical.” So, in this case, the world of the Kit Kat Klub and the cabaret acts performed there, metaphorically tell the story of Weimar decadence curdling into fascism.
There are earlier examples of concept musicals, but Cabaret was the first one to be a major success, and the form was really never the same again. And we have Hal Prince to thank for it, as it was his idea to tell the story that way and make the nightclub a central setting. Van Druten’s play is set entirely in the boarding house and Isherwood sets several scenes at various nightclubs but he doesn’t focus on any of them.
Despite this innovation, Cabaret is only half a concept musical. Half of it is a traditional book musical. There are songs that are performances at the Klub, like “Two Ladies,” and then there are songs that are like any other song from any other musical, like “Married.” Fosse would do away with all of the book songs for the movie version. Later revivals that turn the whole theatre into a nightclub also attempt to take the concept further than Hal Prince did, while keeping the book songs.
Because of those later versions, I think it’s easy to dismiss just how revolutionary what Prince did here was. This is a time when Broadway musicals weren’t dark, they weren’t provocative. This one is. It’s cynical. WWII had only been over for about 20 years, these wounds were pretty fresh. Lenya actually fled Europe because of the Nazis. That they made this material a musical at all was daring. Let’s not lose sight of that.
Tim’s Take
I know this is going to be a controversial opinion, but Cabaret has never really worked for me. On stage, at least, I think the movie is a vast improvement. I saw the Mendes revival with Alan Cumming and Emma Stone in 2014, and I saw the Frecknall revival on Broadway a couple of times. And I didn’t like either of those productions. But we’re not here to talk about that, what did I think listening to the original album? Especially listening to it directly after Flora, the Red Menace, I fully concede the brilliance of Kander & Ebb. This is so much more interesting than Flora’s music. It is darker, more expressive. Ebb’s lyrics are unpretentious but so versatile. There are cute songs, there are deeply sad songs. And the irony that I associate with Kander & Ebb makes it’s grand entrance into their work here. It feels like Hal Prince as a director was the collaborator the songwriters needed to become the K&E we think of today. This score is orders of magnitude better than their score for Flora.
The music also gestures back to the Berlin sound of the era, Weill and others. It’s Kander and Ebb looking backward in subject and inspiration in order to move the art form forward.
Cabaret’s treatment of fascism
But, like I said, I do have some problems with the material. On a basic level, I just don’t know how effective satire singing nazis are ever going to be for me. In my last video, we talked about a certain glibness to the treatment of communism in Flora the Red Menace, and I think it can be argued that the same applies to Nazism here. Of course, Kander, Ebb, Prince, and Masteroff were all Jewish and they took this subject matter seriously. I don’t doubt their intentions. But it’s a very fine line to walk. That the Nazi anthem in the show, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, has been co-opted by real life neo-Nazis and white supremacists, speaks to what I feel is this show’s problem with depicting things to shock the audience without much of a really worthy purpose behind it.
The show is set in 1930 Berlin, it can’t have been too shocking when Cliff pulls out a copy of Mein Kampf or when Ernst shows up sporting a Nazi armband. I think what’s truly shocking to the 60s theatre-going set is the vulgarity. Songs like “Two Ladies,” the abortion, the general naughty vibe of the Emcee. In addition to raunchiness just not being to my personal taste, I question the narrative function of it. Is the vulgar milieu of the Klub a symbol of Weimar libertinism, the very thing that brought Isherwood to Berlin (even if he doesn’t say it), or is it associated with the changing of the political tide? What is the actual role of the Emcee? He performs anti-Semitic songs and does the Nazi salute with the Kit Kat girls, but he’s also queer-coded. Is he an agent of Nazism or a victim of it? Mendes certainly decides he’s a victim. What am I missing here? Genuinely, leave a comment with your interpretation of all this.
The salient point being made about fascism is that “it’s really easy not to notice when it’s taking over,” which is a valid point and one the show argues both through the drama and the music, but it’s not exactly a profound insight.
It also lends the show an air of “gotcha.” In order to demonstrate the subtle encroachment of Nazism into Berlin society, the show lulls the audience by entertaining them and then pulling the rug out from under them. “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” being a prime example of this - the song presents as a silly love song, a novelty song, a two and a half minute setup for the punchline, which is revealed to be anti-Semitic joke. The audience is primed to laugh and if they do, they quickly realize how insidious the joke is and how cruel the Emcee is for making it. In Prince’s staging, the mirror hanging above the audience drops the distortion at this moment, so the audience can clearly see themselves, to either catch themselves laughing or to sit in uncomfortable silence. That’s the desired effect, it’s provocative, by which I mean it’s a provocation. It’s a dare.
But once the audience has figured out this trick, they quickly realize their values aren’t being challenged. That’s what makes it so easy for a director (like Rebecca Frecknall) to come along and completely remove all of the discomfort the audience is meant to feel.
While I’m on the subject of “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” there’s another big difference anyone who has seen the movie or a revival of Cabaret would definitely notice about this version and it comes in this song which has the final lyric of “she isn’t a meeskite at all” instead of the more famous and original version “she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” That’s a massive pulled-punch. Apparently the original line prompted threats of boycott from Jewish groups when the show was doing its out of town tryout, so Hal Prince decided to change it for Broadway and severely dampened its impact. I mean, if you’re going to do it, do it, you know?
The missing center of the narrative
The other issue I have is a narrative one. Masteroff’s book owes a lot of debt to van Druten’s play for giving dramatic structure to Isherwood’s writings, especially where the Cliff-Sally relationship is concerned. But that’s where my issue lies: Cliff and Sally are ostensibly the main characters of this show, but they get seriously short-changed.
Even though he’s the point of view character, Cliff doesn’t sing a lot. He does actually sing more in this version than the revivals. “Perfectly Marvelous” is a duet for him and Sally and “Why Should I Wake Up?” is a solo song for him in act one. That one is the weakest song in the show, and all the revivals cut it.
The idea of a non-singing protagonist seems to be intriguing to the creators. Kander would try it again with his 2015 musical Kid Victory. But it’s debatable whether it ever really works. I don’t think it does in Cabaret, where the lack of Cliff songs belies a lack of character. I get that the idea is “I am a camera”, Cliff’s a passive observer writing about what he witnessed. He doesn’t care until he does, and that’s what gives the structure of this thing its spine. Shouldn’t he sing at the end then? When he finally has something to say?
Bert Convy, who I only knew as the host of Super Password because I love 80s game shows, does an alright job with the singing, I get the reason for the later productions cutting “Why Should I Wake Up” but if you’re doing that, “Perfectly Marvelous” should go too. Because, as it stands in the revivals, that’s a book song for characters who don’t get book songs otherwise. In fact, Sally doesn’t get to sing between “Perfectly Marvelous” in the first act and the title song deep into the second act. As a result, Sally gets lost on this album. Where is she? A big part of that problem is Jill Haworth simply isn’t a really captivating performer. I know the idea is to be true to Isherwood’s Sally, who wasn’t talented, but again that’s another intriguing idea that doesn’t really ever really work in execution. The contemporaneous reviews all ragged on Haworth pretty hard, and I really don’t want to regurgitate any tired old criticisms in these videos because I’m trying to come to them with a fresh perspective, but I’m gonna have to agree that Haworth’s Sally holds this show back.
The other issue at the heart of the show’s Cliff problem is that they can’t say he’s gay. Or, rather, they chose not to. The narrator of the Berlin Stories was based by Isherwood on himself, he’s even called Christopher Isherwood in most of them, and he’s gay in those stories. It’s not a main area of focus (Isherwood would decades later write another memoir about his time in Berlin that goes into detail), but it’s there. I suppose it’s possible that the creators of the musical viewed Cliff, their version of this character, as closeted and they just couldn’t get away with a gay protagonist in 1966, but I kind of doubt that because the whole Sally-pregnancy plot hinges on him having a heterosexual relationship. He’s just straight. Reincorporating the queerness back into the character is something that all the revivals have had to contend with, none successfully, because they can’t do away with that pesky little thing: the plot of the musical.
I think there’s something to be said about the character’s silence about his sexuality in his writing and his silence on political matters. It’s a thread that Isherwood himself doesn’t entirely pull together, but if you’re adapting Isherwood, 3 decades after the fact, you kinda have to do something with it. To sidestep it entirely is frustrating, to say the least.
To give them some credit, there are certainly elements of queerness in the show. Lyrics in the Telephone Song, the Emcee’s whole deal, and there’s a bit of cruising vibe to the scene where Cliff meets Ernst on the train.
Song of the Show
Song of the Show is a tough one for me to reward.
This version of the score doesn’t have “Maybe This Time,” “Money,” or “Mien Herr,” which were all added for the movie. It does have several songs you’ve probably never heard of such as Cliff's song “Why Should I Wake Up?” and “Meeskite,” a song for Gilford’s Herr Schultz. These obscure songs are not terrible, but decidedly second-tier.
“Wilkomenn,” the opening number, is obviously very famous, but it’s a mood setter more than anything else. Sally’s numbers, “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Cabaret” are brilliantly written. They are really entertaining as nightclub songs but also they establish Sally’s character, they work on multiple levels of storytelling. But, as I said, I have a problem with Haworth’s performance. I don’t really get why Prince cast her. In 1966, she was a 20 year old British actress who had had some movie parts and TV roles, but no real stage experience and she wasn’t a singer. Apparently, Kander & Ebb wanted Liza to play Sally, which would make sense coming right off of Flora, but Prince nixed the idea. The version of Sally that Liza would eventually play in the movie is a pretty different interpretation, and, of course, that’s the version of the character that became iconic. So, I wouldn’t give Song of the Show to those songs.
The Scheinder-Schultz storyline is sentimental and as subtle as a brick through the window, but I love the songs that come from it. “Married,” “It Couldn’t Please Me More,” “What Would You Do?” are all great songs. There really has never been anyone like Lenya before or since, has there? That distinctive, borderline strange voice. Kander & Ebb must have relished getting to write for her, especially since her husband Kurt Weill is an obvious inspiration for the score. (If you think you aren’t familiar with Lenya’s work, perhaps you’d know the shoe knife-wielding Spectre agent Rosa Klebb).
So, let’s go ahead and give Song of the Show to “Married”. Why not? It’s not a number with Kander & Ebb’s trademark irony, it’s not one of those numbers that means the opposite of what the lyrics say, it’s actually really simple and sweet. That’s not a mode I really associate with Kander & Ebb, but it’s one they, surprisingly, work well in.
Ranking
Given my pre-existing reservations about this show, I wasn’t sure if it was going to end up as high as most people would except, but even with my issues, Cabaret is a fascinating, complex, rich text to which that boring, trite Flora the Red Menace cannot hold a candle to it. Number one!
Join us next time for a discussion of a musical I’ve never listened to so much as a note from, Robert Goulet in The Happy Time
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