Cabaret

Popular Cabarets
Apart from the vast stages like The
Wintergarten was the tingeltangel which often
was no more than a raised platform in a bar or
restaurant. It featured both those at the very start
and those at the very end of their cabaret
careers. The scenes featured in the Marlene
Dietrich film of 1930 The Blue Angel were
typical of a tingeltangel, The material wasrisqué
and the female performers acted as hostesses
mingling with the audience encouraging them to
buy drinks and other services on offer. The
name is derived from the sound of the coins
landing on a plate as it is passed around the
audience.
Cabaret act at Le Boeuf sur le Toit
Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel
In 1922, Le Boeuf sur le Toit (The Ox on the
Roof: The Nothing-Doing Bar, as it was known
in English) opened in Paris with Jean Cocteau’s
(a famous novelist, dramatist and filmmaker)
blessing, became the fashionable watering place,
where Tristan Tzara read poetry and virtuoso
pianists played Mozart and Gershwin. It was
closed by the Germans in 1943, but reopened
after the war.
1920’s Berlin was filled with Russian refugees. I.
E. Duvan-Tortsov, a former Moscow Art
Theatre actor, created a cabaret, Der Blaue
Vogel (The Blue Bird, named after a play by
playwright Maurice Maeterlinck famously
produced at the MAT ), an imitation of the
Russian cabaret, The Bat. The Blue Bird
recreated picture-book scenes from Russian
folklore, heavily stylized and picturesquely
costumed. Toy soldiers and idealized peasant
girls were stocks-in-trade. It was “An enchanting
cabaret, but rather too harmless.”
Cabaret act at Der Blaue Vogel Program from Der blaue Vogel
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