Cabaret- Page 2

[Gothampc]

Posted: 8/2/09 at 12:57pm

"My thought exactly. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine how someone could think it was garbage."

They reduced the character of Cliff to a secondary role.

There was zero creativity in the Two Ladies number. As the movie demonstrates, the song is great for highly creative choreography. They took a hilariously bawdy song and ruined it.

Showing the MC in a concentration camp at the end took all the punch out of the ending. It would be like Audrey 2 eating itself at the end of Little Shop.

[Smaxie]

Posted: 8/2/09 at 2:21pm

I thought the revival went overboard in a couple of aspects, but there was a lot to admire as well. The original 1966 version of the material tends to veer back and forth between a traditional book musical and the innovative concept musicals that would follow in the 70s.

In its favor, the revival managed to get everything moving at a brisk pace, with the unit set and the book scenes taking place in a sort of Kit Kat Klub version of reality, with the beefed-up role of the Emcee witnessing and commenting on everything - instead of the Kit Kat Klub itself and the numbers popping up in limbo for ironic effect in the original version.

It was also a major benefit to make Cliff bisexual, rather than the hetero Cliff in the original version and the half-hearted bisexual Cliff in the '87 version.

As Cabaret is set in 1929-1930, it concerns itself with the onset of Nazi Germany and the collective apathetic mindset that would allow Nazism to happen. As such, I did think the Roundabout revival - with the track-marked and bruised arms and legs of the Klub performers and the full-on decadence right from the start of "Wilkommen" - was at full-tilt, with less sense of watching a civilized cultured society go to seed.

The much-discussed concentration camp ending of the revival is also (in my opinion) not necessarily the point of the writing. The show is about the onset of Nazism, not really the end result. However, Cabaret in 1966 was a mere 21 years after the end of World War II. Cabaret in 1998 was 53 years later, and the more sledgehammer ending of the revival was probably needed, as the Holocaust over time - for some people - has moved from realm of "recent event" to "history". Yet, at one of my later visits to the Roundabout production, I was surrounded by some audience members who were bewildered or worse still, laughed at the ending, so even as blatant as I thought it was, perhaps it still wasn't blatant enough.

Still, I do miss the subtlety of the mirrors in the Hal Prince production - the show began and ended with the audience reflected in the onstage mirrors. The audience is forced at the end to confront itself (as voiced literally in one of the show's songs, "What Would You Do?"). Not sure if that ending would still work for audiences today, but that at least to me, is what Cabaret is about.