This was replaced by a relationship between two younger people, one a German Jew who passes as protestant, and the other a rich Jewish heiress, who eventually marry. Many changes were made: Cliff was renamed Brian, new songs were written and some were dropped, and most notably the plotline of Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz’ relationship is cut entirely. The show would be adapted into the famous 1972 film by the same name, starring Joel Grey as the Emcee, the role he originated in the opening Broadway run, and Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles. The stage musical stands as an adaptation of an adaptation already, and the show would only go on to metamorphose time and time again. It is impossible to discuss Cabaret without musing on the nature of adaptation and revival. The show ends with the Emcee and the chorus reprising the opening song “Willkommen”, this time a discordant cacophonous mess, inviting the audience into the nightmare of Nazi Germany. The title song is performed by Sally not long after she tells Cliff she has had an abortion and is a naive celebration with an undercurrent of unease. The unstable political landscape of this period begins to rapidly encroach on the characters – Schneider breaks off her engagement with Schultz amid rising anti-semitic attacks, and Cliff leaves Berlin without Sally feeling it is not a safe place to raise a child. His songs comment on the action happening on stage in a sinisterly satirical tone as the show progresses the Emcee becomes more and more grotesque until it becomes clear he is the personification of the performative nature of the Nazi Party. The whole show is intercut with numbers from the Emcee, the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub. Sally discovers she is pregnant, the father unknown, though it is suggested it could be Cliff’s, and Schneider announces her engagement to Schultz.
The two find themselves sharing a room in a boarding house owned by the elderly Fraulein Schneider and growing closer while Schneider falls in love with Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit shop owner.
The story of the musical follows Cliff, a young American writer in Berlin who meets the erudite and charming Sally Bowles, a young British performer who works in the seedy Berlin Kit Kat Klub. What many don’t know is that Cabaret is in fact an adaptation of the play I am a Camera by John Van Druten, itself an adaptation of the semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. The musical has a place close to my heart as a representation of my favourite moment of queer history, Weimar Berlin, and I feel there is a lot to be learned about the process of adaptation and alteration by tracking the musical’s changes over the years.Ĭabaret was written by the songwriting duo Kander and Ebb and first performed in 1966. Perhaps one of the most changed works in recent years, from conception to present performances, is Cabaret, soon to have a West End revival at the Playhouse Theatre. “Queerness is permissible when it is a villain” Even more recent shows get a revival every now and then.
Every time a Shakespeare play is put on, the director is tasked with reviving the centuries-old text in a way which makes it still gripping and prescient for a modern audience. Theatre often is, in essence, about the adaptation and revitalisation of prior stories, from Renaissance history plays, to the new theatrical adaptations of novels and myths coming out of Cambridge itself.
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