RICHARD OSBORNE

COME TO THE CABARET!

I wonder what thoughts went through John Kander’s mind when news came through in late November of Stephen Sondheim’s death at the age of 91.

John Kander, 94 and still with us, composed the music for Cabaret, the regime-changing 1966 musical based on Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye Berlin that’s playing (until 14th May) at London’s Playhouse in a suitably showbiz yet absorbingly thought-through new staging by Rebecca Frecknall.

Seeing Cabaret even as the Sondheim obituaries were coming through was a curious experience. The obituary facts were broadly right, but the perspectives were often awry.

Radio 4’s Last Word introduced Sondheim as ‘the most influential musical-theatre composer of the last 70 years’. It’s a line that pretty well sums up the current state of arts coverage in our mainstream media, with its perpetual craving for hyperbole and its lack of factual accuracy. ‘The last 70 years,’ indeed! Sondheim was barely out of graduate school in 1951. In fact, two decades would pass before Company (1970) and Follies (1971), the shows with which he’s said to have revolutionised the musical. Except that it wasn’t him; it was his friend, the director Hal Prince.

It was the 28-year-old Prince who’d saved West Side Story and seen it to the stage. And it was Prince who dreamt up Cabaret, the first successful ‘concept musical’ in a world where rock and pop – electronically driven, commercially impregnable – were threatening to hole Broadway below the waterline.

John Van Druten’s cosy 1950s rom-com and film I Am a Camera had sanitised Isherwood’s Berlin even more than (at the time) Isherwood himself had done, airbrushing out the narrator’s sexuality, the rent boys, the lesbian hookers and the abortion. The Nazis were retained, for local colour.

Prince changed all that. Working with writer Joe Masteroff and lyricist Fred Ebb, he created a show that interwove Isherwood’s ‘book story’ with the phantasmagoric world of Berlin cabaret, used both as a metaphor for the collapse of Weimar Germany and as a ‘Could it happen here?’ question about 1960s America.

Avant-garde Soviet theatre was one inspiration; another was a cabaret Prince had seen in Stuttgart, where the master of ceremonies was a camp and strangely sinister dwarf. With the multitasking Joel Grey on hand, and Olivier’s Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer as an added layer of inspiration, they placed their emcee centre-stage.

It took 30 years, and director Sam Mendes, to play the musical in a cabaret setting, exploiting to the full the Weimar degeneracy, and leaving uncut the pay-off line of the emcee’s gorilla song, ‘If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all’.

Frecknall’s achievement is to