Cabaret

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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 Each version of the material was considered startling in its day; each version, in turn, was superseded by one that was more radical and harder edged.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
“Art…more effectively than alcohol or love. enables humans to forge reality. through immersion in the dream. Standing above the multitude. the artist has limitless power to express the inexpressible. reveal the unknown. and escape the mediocrity of life” -Arthur Schopenhauer (German philosopher) 25
Page 1 and 2: CABARET “We want pure art, beauty
Page 3 and 4: Welcome to Berlin It is Germany, 19
Page 5 and 6: After Germany’s loss in WWI, the
Page 7 and 8: Poster for “The Lavender Lay” T
Page 9 and 10: Popular Cabarets Apart from the vas
Page 11 and 12: The Emcee: The Conferencier Paul Mo
Page 13 and 14: Germany: The First Thirty Years 191
Page 15 and 16: The Weimar Republic The Weimar Repu
Page 17 and 18: How to make a Prairie Oyster! 1 who
Page 19 and 20: Sex and Prostitution Many factors a
Page 21 and 22: Bertolt Brecht Bertolt Brecht, one
Page 23: Cabaret: Production History 1966 -
Page 27 and 28: Art…has existed in every known ci
Page 29: Bibliography/Webliography 29

Cabaret

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