Gritty musical ‘Cabaret’ asks, ‘How could Hitler have happened?’
It’s been 51 years since “Cabaret” debuted on Broadway.
John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical portraying the last days of the Weimar Republic through the lens of a seedy cabaret in Berlin has had unusual staying power, thanks in large measure to Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall’s gritty 1998 revival.
B.T. McNicholl and Jennifer Werner were in on the ground floor of the Mendes-Marshall revival. Both joined the show in 1998, McNicholl as associate director and Werner as dance captain and swing performer.
McNicholl has directed more than 20 spinoffs of the Mendes-Marshall version, including the tour stopping off through Sunday at the Kravis Center. Werner, who staged the choreography for the tour, has choreographed numerous regional productions.
The musical is based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play “I Am a Camera,” which in turn was adapted from Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel “Goodbye to Berlin” about his youthful adventures in the 1930s.
Mendes and Marshall intensified the musical, stripping away most of the set, ratcheting up the debauchery and requiring cast members to double as the orchestra. (There’s also a conductor, keyboard player, bassist and drummer in the pit.)
The staging connects every song to the cabaret.
“Sam said that in the 1960s, “Cabaret” was a Broadway musical with a cabaret in it,” McNicholl said. “He turned it inside out. Now it’s a cabaret with a Broadway musical in it.”
As conceived by producer Hal Prince, the musical inhabits two worlds.
One is that of the traditional musical, framing the love affair between American writer Clifford Bradshaw and cabaret singer Sally Bowles and another romance between a gentile boarding house owner and a Jewish fruit seller.
The other is the decadent world of the cabaret, where the acts, particularly the emcee, address the audience and comment on a rapidly disintegrating society that’s about to be engulfed by the Nazis. Tunes from this world, such as “Money” and “If You Could See Her,” are among Kander and Ebb’s darkest.
“Cabaret” is an actordriven show, McNicholl said.
Most of the tour cast is young. That’s fitting because they give the show an exuberance and energy like that of Berlin’s cabarets of the time and the characters in Isherwood’s novel, he said.
“Cabaret” was Werner’s first Broadway experience.
“It’s the biggest challenge I ever had as a performer,” she said.
“It was terrifying because you were expected to play an instrument. Most of the time I was trying to put one foot in front of the other and learn all my tunes.”
There were a lot of tunes, too, as the Kit Kat Klub performers had to master not only their own parts but those of every performer who played their instrument.
Werner was assigned the clarinet and saxophone. She also learned to play the accordion, as she sometimes went on as Fraulein Kost, a prostitute and Nazi sympathizer.
“If you’re understudying her, you have to pick that up,” she said. “You say, ‘Sure, I’ll play the accordion,’ and then you do.”
But not until many tries and many tears later.
Mendes has said that “Cabaret” is “really about the central mystery of the 20th century — how Hitler could have happened.”
It’s a question that bears repeating, Werner said, as we move further from the Holocaust but not from the forces in human nature that set it in motion.