Cabaret

Christopher Isherwood’s
The Berlin Stories
"I am a camera with its shutter open." There is
something unmistakably 20th Century about
this, the opening line to Goodbye to Berlin. In
their coolness and clarity and melancholy
detachment these words express more about a
moment in time than most entire novels do.
Berlin Stories is not quite a novel; it's actually
two short ones stuck together, The Last of Mr.
Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. But they form
one coherent snapshot of a lost world, the
antic, cosmopolitan Berlin of the 1930's, where
jolly expatriates dance faster and faster, as if
that would save them from the creeping rise of
Nazism. One of Isherwood's greatest
characters, the racy, doomed Sally Bowles,
took center stage in the book's musical
adaptation, Cabaret, but the theatrical version
can't match the power and richness of the
original. – TIME Magazine
The Stories
John van Druten’s
I am the Camera
Adapted from Isherwood’s “The Berlin Stories” for
the stage, “I am the Camera” follows the life of
Chrisopher Isherwood as he moves into Fraulein
Schneider’s flat in Berlin (the setting of the play). “I
am a Camera” was adapted into a film and then later
adapted into the musical “Cabaret”.
Sally. …Oh,
Chris, am I too
awful—for me I
mean?
Christopher. No,
Sally. I’m very
fond of you.
Sally. I do hope
you are. Because
I am of you.
“If Mendes’s production is the perfect ‘Cabaret’ for the 1990’s, the show’s evolution serves as a
glittering mirror of the theatre’s changing Zeitgeist—of how both our esthetic tastes and our attitudes
towards sex and history have grown tougher and more explicit over the last half century. Each version
of the material was considered startling in its day; each version, in turn, was superseded by one that
was more radical and harder edged. Isherwood’s 1930’s Berlin stories aspired to transparency: the
narrator was a dispassionate observer who described himself as “a camera with its shutter open.” The
1951 van Druten play based on these stories took a Chekhovian stance toward the material: it was less
a story about pre-WWII Germany than a gently comic portrait of Holly Golightly who happened to
find herself in Hitler’s Berlin. Prince’s 1966 production brought the Nazi menace to the foreground,
and suggested, as Prince once put it, that “what happened then in Berlin could happen here now.”
Now only did the show’s dark subject matter—Hitler, promiscuity, abortion—mark a departure from
traditional Broadway musicals, but it’s innovative staging also pointed the way to the “concept”
musical that Prince would soon bring to full fruition. In keeping with the times, the 1972 movie and
the 1987 Broadway revival grappled more directly with both the hero’s bisexuality and the Nazi’s rise
to power. Mendes’s production of “Cabaret” recaptures the shock those earlier versions had for
theatergoers of the day. It is darker, raunchier and more disturbing than it’s predecessors, and by
turning the entire theatre into the Kit Kat Klub (many theatergoers actually sit at café tables), it
implicates the audience in the frenetic escapism, and coming horror, of 1930’s Berlin.”
-Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)
24