From page to stage: Cabaret's camera blinks

An analysis of the recent Broadway revival of the musical Cabaret offers a fascinating case study in the evolution of a creative concept.  This widely known stage musical and movie of the same name are both based upon a play, which was in turn founded upon a series of short stories by Christopher Isherwood (1904-86).  As an examination of the various versions demonstrates, Cabaret on stage bears only a quirky resemblance to its original source material.

 In 1929, Isherwood first visited Berlin.  In his autobiography, Christopher and His Kind (1976), he describes the visit as “one of the decisive events of my life.”  Enchanted by the city’s sexual and artistic opportunities, he immediately began studying German. At the end of the year, he returned to Berlin, to live there until 1933.  He planned to write an enormous semi-autobiographical novel about the city and its people entitled The Lost.  However, he was unable to complete it, and only some vignettes and character sketches from the proposed book appeared in magazine form.  A longer fragment, “Sally Bowles,” was printed in a separate small volume.  All these pieces were collected and published in 1939 as Goodbye to Berlin. 

The most important piece in the book is “Sally Bowles.” In it Isherwood himself appears as “Chris.”  Sally is a would-be demimondaine with emerald-green fingernails, a second-rate singer in a nondescript bar.  She boasts of her lovers and spends most of her time trying to make reluctant men pay her bills. 

Before its publication, Isherwood expressed dissatisfaction with “Sally Bowles,” denouncing it as trivial. He even considered excluding it from his Berlin collection. The other pieces were graver in tone, dealing with real Germans.  It is true that the character of Sally is hard to take seriously -- a wide-eyed innocent aping deepening dissolution, amoral as a child is amoral, a child so absorbed in her make-believe grown-up play that even a disaster like abortion fails to rouse her.  Isherwood complained, “Sally wasn’t a victim, wasn’t a proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent, upper-middle-class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin whenever she chose.”

She did however enchant readers.  When John Van Druten read “Sally Bowles,” he said he immediately knew there was a play in it.  His I Am a Camera opened in New York in 1951. 

In this stage version, Chris and Sally appear at first almost unchanged;  however, the playwright introduces a character of his own invention -- Mrs. Watson-Courtneidge, Sally’s mother.  “That’s my real name,” Sally confesses. “Only you can’t imagine the Germans pronouncing it.”  Another modification Van Druten made supplies a love story.  Fritz and Natalia, two characters from Goodbye to Berlin who never even met in that book, fall in love and marry in I Am a Camera.  Fritz is a young German on the make. Natalia is a Jewish department store heiress.  They fall in love, but Natalia’s family wishes her to marry a Jew.  Then Fritz confesses to Chris and Sally that he too is a Jew.  He has lied about his origin just to make life simpler for himself.  Having “come out” about it, he marries Natalia at the end of the play. 

This subplot does more than counterpoint the more casual relationship of Chris and Sally.  It introduces for the first time the specter of Nazism, which becomes such a powerful theme in later incarnations of the concept.  The word “Nazi” is never even mentioned in “Sally Bowles.”  Only one character makes an off-handed anti-Semitic remark. 

Although a film record was made of I Am a Camera, not until the opening of Cabaret in 1966 did the concept evolve further.  The musical version (book by Joe Masteroff, lyrics by Fred Ebb, music by John Kander) added another entire level of meaning by creating the character of the Emcee.  As portrayed with chillingly evil energy by Joel Grey, the Emcee sings a razor-edged three-way commentary: on the internal story of Cliff (as Chris is renamed) and Sally; on the external political deterioration of Germany; and on the audience itself.  In token of this, the first thing the audience saw on stage was a huge mirror, reflecting their own connivance in the Cabaret. 

Sally’s nightclub, now dubbed the Kit Kat Club, is far removed indeed from the shabby-genteel bar (called Lady Windermere’s Fan, no less) in “Sally Bowles.”  The element of sexual and moral decadence which underlaid Goodbye to Berlin is now displayed openly on stage, with Sally usually clad in red garter belts or fishnet tights.  This is actually a return to the Berlin experienced by Isherwood. 

Masteroff dropped the Fritz-Natalia subplot completely, adding instead the character of Herr Shultz, the Jewish merchant. Herr Shultz woos and wins Fraulein Schneider, the landlady.  But the engagement collapses when Fraulein Schneider decides that marrying a Jew might endanger her business. 

Lastly, the element of Nazism comes well to the fore.  Few people who see Cabaret on stage or screen can avoid shivering when “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is sung.  In this anthem, clean-cut young Nazis hail the glory of the coming Fatherland in glowing, Wagnerian-romantic terms. 

For the film version of Cabaret, Jay Presson Allen reworked much of the material yet again.  Cliff (né Chris) is renamed Brian, and becomes an English university student.  Since Liza Minnelli was cast as Sally Bowles from the start, Sally had to be an American. 

In spite of all this, Allen professed a wish to get back to Goodbye to Berlin.  He dropped Fraulein Schneider’s amours and returned to the Natalia-Fritz subplot.  The romantic and conventional union of this couple now balances very pleasingly against the more lurid Brian-Sally connection.  The viewer gets a failed romance and a successful one, the latter achingly poignant because of what the viewer knows is to come for Jews in Germany. 

In 1987, the stage version of Cabaret was successfully revived, reuniting the old creative team.  Songs were cut and new songs added.  The softening and concessions to popular taste were removed.  Cliff is plainly bisexual;  a reviewer described his affair with Sally as the last heterosexual fling of an essentially gay man.  The entire effect is darker, more somber.  In an interview the songwriter expressed the message: “We must never let our guard down or allow the very real and constant presence of prejudice and hate to take over.”  To see how much the concept has evolved, we need only compare this statement to Isherwood’s famous words at the beginning of Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” 

In surveying the various incarnations of the work, some trends become plain.  The first is the way the plot is steadily strengthened by polarizing the elements of the story.  Isherwood’s camera was deliberately set to record in shades of gray.  Other creators stepped in to paint the blacks darker and bleach the whites.  As they do, the story acquires far more power.  The swastika haunts Cabaret like an evil dream; it is never so much as mentioned in “Sally Bowles.”  Chris and Sally are mere friends in the short story, but lovers in the movie.