cabaret, joel grey, liza minelli--10/18/24
Today's selection--from Colored Lights by John Kander, Fredd Ebb and Greg Lawrence. The creation of the legendary musical Cabaret:
“Produced and directed by Harold Prince, Cabaret was based on John Van Druten's play I Am a Camera as well as Christopher Isherwood's stories about Weimar Berlin and the rise of Nazism. Prince commissioned Kander and Ebb for the score and Joe Masteroff for the book. The original cast featured Joel Grey (the epicene Emcee), Lotte Lenya (the gruff landlady), Jack Gilford (the Jewish grocer), Jill Haworth (the English cabaret singer Sally Bowles), and Bert Convy (the American writer). The show opened at the Broadhurst Theater on November 20, 1966, ran for 1,165 performances, and won eight Tonys, including Best Score for Kander and Ebb.
“With its dark subject matter and innovative form—the phantasmagoric musical within a musical—Cabaret was hailed as a startling breakthrough that pushed musical theater into a more conceptualized realm. The songwriters added several new numbers ‘Maybe This Time,’ ‘Mein Herr,’ and ‘Money, Money’'— to Bob Posse's 1972 film version, which refocused the drama for its stars, Liza Minnelli, Joel Grey, and Michael York. Under Harold Prince's direction, the first Broadway revival of Cabaret opened on October 29, 1987, and ran 262 performances despite being panned by New York Times critic Frank Rich.
“A much revised version of the show returned to Broadway by way of London in 1998, choreographed by Rob Marshall and directed by both Marshall and Sam Mendes. New scenes were added, and four of the original Broadway songs were replaced by three from Posse's movie and ‘I Don't Care Much,’ which had been cut from the original production. The musical became more daring and brazenly erotic. With the leads played by Natasha Richardson, Alan Cumming, Ron Rifkin, and Mary Louise Wilson, Cabaret was once again lauded as an exhilarating triumph.
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| Original Broadway promotional poster by Tom Morrow |
“KANDER: Cabaret evolved from Hal Prince's concept.
“EBB: The concept was something that we were never as self-conscious about as the people who were guiding our careers were. We didn't have the idea of a concept musical in mind when we were writing Cabaret.
“KANDER: We were just trying to write an entertaining piece.
“EBB: It was made to order. Hal would say, ‘Maybe we should have a number here for this moment.’ We were working in a form which was very accessible to me, the revue form, where performers just come out and do a number. I was comfortable with that. I don't think that I appreciated the portentousness of the subject we were treating with a cabaret in Hitler's Berlin, or the seriousness of it, until that was pointed out to me.
“KANDER: Unlike the integrated musical where everything grows in a very natural way out of each situation, Hal's musicals, beginning with Cabaret, are often a conceptual presentation with actors observing and songs that comment on the action. I think in a way that may have been his reaction to the more traditional musical form. His concept certainly influenced us a great deal.
“EBB : It dictated our whole style. We were writing vaudeville.
“KANDER: All of Cabaret is vaudeville.
“EBB : Like a German music hall.
“KANDER: What I remember most is that for months Hal and Joe Masteroff and you and I would sit in a room and play a game that I call '’What if?’ The director, writers, and composer sit in a room together and imagine the characters and elements of the story. That's an area where Hal's strength as a leader of collaboration shone through. We were inventing incidents that were going to be part of the story. What if such and such happens? What if somebody throws a brick through the window?
“EBB : That was how we started to hammer out what the show would be. Out of those meetings came the Emcee, the master of ceremonies, as well as many of the theatrical devices that have worked to the show's enormous advantage.
“KANDER: We wrote a long series of songs that we called ‘Berlin songs.’ We wrote many of those before the Emcee had been conceived, really. Initially they were going to be sung by different characters, and at some point in our conversations they were conceived for one person, the Emcee. That seemed like a really terrific solution. We wrote a lot of Berlin songs and we were fortunate that most of them were not used. ‘Wilkommen’ was the first one.
“EBB : That wasn't really a single song but a whole series of numbers. It was ‘Welcome to Berlin,’ and all these songs welcomed you to town. I don't remember specifically who thought of what because it was so collaborative in the backyard of Hal's house, sitting around with everybody just talking about what we hoped title show would be. At some point all these songs became one song sung by one person. I couldn't say specifically when that happened, but that was how it evolved and that was really the glory of that whole piece. I believe the idea of Sally's having an abortion came from you, but I couldn't swear to it. A brick being thrown through Herr Schultz's window—that may have come from me, though I'm not positive. But these were all events that came out in the shaping of the libretto. Joe's contribution was enormous. Of course, he wrote the damn thing while Hal and you and I threw pieces in. There was such joy in that process.
“KANDBR: It was to this day as far as I'm concerned the ideal way for collaborators to work on a piece.
“EBB : I think Cabaret was the best collaborative process we ever had.
“KANDER: Because eventually what that kind of work really means is that everybody ends up doing the same show. In other words, it's not the book writer doing one thing and you and I doing something else.
“EBB: You know the horror of a musical is when you're out of town and the show's not working, and you get together and you find out, ‘Oh, my God, I didn't have that in mind!’ Then you worry about how to fix it because you weren't writing the same piece.
“KANDER: Hal was a master of that process. He was able to free us in a way that we all jumped in without any inhibitions whatsoever. If it was a bad idea, it was a bad idea. One of the reasons that we wrote so many songs for that piece is that we were writing our way into it. The more we wrote, the more we found out what the piece was. As the captain of the collaboration, Hal was able to be selective and to bring us together in agreement about what should be done.
“EBB : Our songs were going to depend on those decisions. I think we knew that Hal had a kind of sublime faith in us, and that was terrifically inspiriting, to know that this master of the musical form believed that we could do it.
“KANDER: I think in every show we've done, we've tried to at least partially re-create that with the '’What if?’ sessions.
“EBB: It doesn't always work, but we hope for that. It depends most on having the right idea. Cabaret was the right idea. You work on other things with the same modus operandi, and if you have the wrong idea you don't succeed.”
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