Wilkommen

Last night was the preview for Chicago.  A preview is basically a dress rehearsal with an audience.  While the audience was entering the house (that is the term for the auditorium), there was music being played over the PA.  Finding-your-seat-music, perhaps.  Playing was the soundtrack from Cabaret, a show that also features the work of John Kander and Fred Ebb.  I loved this soundtrack when I was in high school, and, now that I revisit the plot, I realize that, as a kid, I had absolutely no idea what was going on. 

Cabaret is about a Berlin nightclub, the Kit Kat Klub, and is set in 1931, just as the Nazis were rising to power in Germany.  I had initially thought that it was a love story, and in a way it is, but it is a tragic love story.  There is a love triangle, a pregnancy, an abortion, a pineapple, and forbidden love in a time when Jewish people were in very real danger of losing their lives (found in the sub-plot between the boarding house owner and a Jewish fruit seller).  The Emcee's songs in the Kit Kat serve as a commentary on the action: dancing with an ape to show how love is blind, how greed and money carry more influence on day to day life than we'd like it to, and how terrifying prejudice and the desire of power can disrupt ordinary people's lives.  It's a brutal satire of the politics of that time period, wrapped up in a seedy, musical bow. 

The music is great, though.  Originally produced on the London stage in 1968, there was a Broadway revival in 1987, and yet another London revival in 1993, featuring Alan Cummings as the Emcee (this is the recording I'd listened to).  Joel Grey was the Emcee in the Broadway revival, and played the role in the 1972 film version, starring Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles, and directed by Bob Fosse (Fosse haunts me.  It's like that movie The Number 23, where the number 23 shows up in permutations, direct relations, or indirect relation to the character.  Fosse is my number 23.  He's everywhere I look.)  As with most film adaptations, the movie plot is slightly altered from the stage show, but the elements are still there.

Life is a cabaret, old chum.  Come to the cabaret!