But ‘Cabaret’ is now more about the changing stars, and the original star used to be that faded starlet BerlinĬabaret‘s main characters live on Nollendorfplatz. That original production catered to post-Eisenhower sensibilities-the hairstyles were kewpie beehive, the sexuality muffled, the menace of racism flattened into innuendo-but for people who had lived through the cataclysm, it was horrifying to watch characters blithely booze and drink as the architects of the Final Solution crept in. The Wall was just a few years old and the city was known for its ignoble rubble and for being the nerve center for Hell. Cabaret is the same way.Ĭabaret was devastating when it premiered in 1966. No use mourning Berlin when you’d love to live there yourself.Ī while ago, I wrote about how audiences of 1949 interpreted South Pacific in a different way than we do today because they perceived so many things that were going unsaid. In fact, no one under 30 thinks Berlin is a bad place to be anymore. No one under 30 remembers the Berlin Wall when it stood. Like him, the audience knows they’re doomed because we knew Berlin was doomed.Īt least, audiences used to know that. In a subtle bit of cultural arrogance, only the American seems to see the truth. The Emcee wants to get high and hump things. Fraulein Kost wants to screw and salute her captors.
Sally Bowles would rather dissolve in gin, Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz want to hide. We are different.Ĭabaret is basically a two-and-a-half-hour suicide note by its characters. Yet the way we receive the show in 2015 is completely different. Because Berlin is different. If you had hit me on the head during intermission in March, 1998, and I had woken up for the second act last week, I may not have noticed the difference. The script is still brilliant, the songs unimpeachable. Same old sleaze, same old impending doom. Alan Cumming seems not to have gained a pound in 16 years.
The show played in a ruined theatre, the Henry Miller’s, and as directed by Sam Mendes, was suffused with the sleazy, perverted atmosphere of a country slumming before the dawn of certain destruction. Back then, a mostly unknown actor named Alan Cumming instantly made his career by emerging from darkness to play the Emcee, and Natasha Richardson was his Sally Bowles. The current revival of Cabaret on Broadway is a perfect copy of the revival that opened in 1998. Sally is Under There: Nollendorfplatz, Shöneberg, Berlin, in 1946
0 kommentar(er)
