Emcee Cabaret

So we all know how Alan Cummings reinvented the character of the Emcee in Cabaret from how Joel Grey did it. Well i was thinking if there ever was to be another Cabaret revival in the next lets say 10 years would you want the character of the Emcee to change again and if so how would you want the character to change.

Updated On: 6/2/15 at 08:01 PM

Updated On: 6/3/15 at 07:58 AM

Ugh. Cabaret is my favorite show, but it's also so tricky because when it gets revived and reinterpreted, I often get the sense that new productions are competing both with each other and with the past to do something "bold" and "new" and to be "the most risque" or create "the most provocative" Cabaret you've ever seen. And that, a lot of times, does not end well. Everybody wants to push the envelope more than everybody else with this show.

I love Cabaret. I love the source material, the play, the novel(s). The Mendes revival (revisal, really?) to me, is definitive. That's not an objective word, but it's MY definitive. That Emcee, for me, that is it. I have seen, and I'm sure in the future will continue to see, some great riffs on that general idea. And I think we're lucky that there's a reinterpretation that's such a great departure from the original but still works as well as it does. Or maybe even better, depending on what you like.

But ten years from now, I don't think I would want to see some other production in which who he is changes radically again. What would it be? How would it work? Why would you do it? Where is it in the text? (I ask these questions having seen the ART production, with Amanda Palmer, and it worked. It was within the framework and it was not a radical reinvention and it didn't change who the character is. But just to say, I'm not advocating a museum piece.) What I really want to see is something that's very close to the character as he is written -- as fleetingly as it is that he appears -- in the Isherwood novels. I want someone who really captures that.

Updated On: 6/3/15 at 12:23 PM

Several regional productions have cast the Emcee as a woman. I know of at least two major productions in Chicago that have done so, but neither performance seemed different enough from previous male emcees to shine new light on the role.

One touch I liked in the Hypocrites 2010 production: The "Two Ladies" number was performed by Lady Emcee, Sally and Cliff.

http://www.theatreinchicago.com/cabaret/3475/

Not sure which performances you were watching. They're pretty different. Interpretively, conceptually, symbolically.

I'm trying to remember what it is exactly because it's been years since I've seen it, but somewhere there's an interview, I believe with Alan but I could be misspeaking, putting really concisely what exactly the big difference is: Joel Grey's Emcee represented, in some ways, Hitler, that which would destroy; Alan's Emcee represented everything that would be destroyed. That's a radical difference, sorry.

Oh and I didn't see the Hypocrites production, I wasn't here yet, but I've heard cool things about it. I've never actually seen a female Emcee in that sense -- where it's actually supposed to be a woman. The ART production used a woman playing a man, but in a way that suggested we were never supposed to fully believe anything we were seeing. It was great.

Updated On: 6/3/15 at 04:23 PM

The original production and its derivatives have the central message of complicity: WE DID THIS. WE LET THIS HAPPEN. NEVER AGAIN. The revival and its derivatives switch the message to one of hindsight: LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO US. NEVER AGAIN.