Cabaret
November 6-8, 13-15 & 20-22, 2009

Cabaret Authors: Kander, Ebb and Masteroff

John Kander and Fred Ebb (Music and Lyrics)

Kander and Ebb were a tremendously successful songwriting team for 40 years. Kander's hard-driving melodies and Ebb's clever but accessible lyrics epitomize what is known as the Broadway sound.

JOHN KANDER (1927- ) grew up in Kansas City, MO and studied music at Oberlin College and Columbia University. His start on Broadway began in 1957 as a rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. In 1962, Kander composed his first musical, A Family Affair.

FRED EBB's (? - 2004) birth year has been listed as anywhere from 1928 to 1936. What's certain is that he grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Columbia University. During the 1950s, he began to write lyrics for Broadway revues.

In 1964, a music publisher introduced Kander and Ebb to one another. Hal Prince then chose them to write the score for Flora the Red Menace. This musical starred a 19-year-old Liza Minnelli, who went on to become the duo's favorite interpreter. In 1966, Kander, Ebb, and Prince collaborated on the smash-hit Cabaret, which ran over 1100 performances.

Kander and Ebb followed up Cabaret with the less successful The Happy Time, Zorba, and 70, Girls, 70. During the 1970s, they branched out into film and television work, helping adapt Cabaret for the big screen, where it won 8 Oscars. They also wrote songs for Funny Lady, New York, New York, and Liza Minnelli's television specials. Their next Broadway success was Chicago (1976).

Kander and Ebb continued to write for legendary actresses: Minnelli in The Act (1978), Lauren Bacall in Woman of the Year (1981), Chita Rivera and Minnelli in The Rink (1984), and Rivera in Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1993). And the World Goes 'Round, a revue of their songs, played off-Broadway in 1991. Kander and Ebb's output slowed in the 1990s, especially after their disappointing Steel Pier in 1997. However, during this time, Cabaret and Chicago were successfully revived on Broadway. In 2002, Chicago was adapted into a Best Picture-winning film.

Together, Kander and Ebb are the recipients of four Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Kander and Ebb were nominated for many additional awards, though surprisingly, their most famous song, New York, New York, didn't even get a nomination.

When Ebb died of a heart attack in 2004, the duo was working on several musicals that had not yet made it to Broadway. These included The Visit (which played in Chicago starring Chita Rivera), and the backstage murder-mystery Curtains. It opened on Broadway with additional lyrics by Rupert Holmes and Kander himself. Kander's contribution, the ballad I Miss the Music, has been interpreted as a moving tribute from him to his songwriting partner of 40 years.

Joe Masteroff (Book)

Best known as the librettist of Cabaret, JOE MASTEROFF (1919 - )has also worked as an actor, playwright and lyricist. During the 1960s, he wrote the librettos for two acclaimed musicals: She Loves Me (1963), and Cabaret (1966). It was Masteroff's idea to call the show Cabaret, after the creative team realized that the original title, Welcome to Berlin, would turn off Jewish theatergoers. Five years later, Masteroff reteamed with Kander and Ebb to write the lesser-known 70, Girls, 70. Although no new Masteroff works have appeared on Broadway since 1971, he has written the libretto for an opera version of Desire Under the Elms, the book and lyrics to the musicals Paramour and Six Wives, and the libretto for a musical version of Anna Christie.

Cabaret: Production History

Most Memorable Productions:

• 1966, Broadway premiere, dir. Harold Prince, with Joel Grey as the Emcee, Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles. 1166 performances.
• 1972, film, dir. Bob Fosse, featuring Joel Grey as the Emcee, Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, and Michael York.
• 1998, Broadway revival , dir. Sam Mendes, with Alan Cumming as the Emcee, Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles. 2377 performances.

Awards

• 1967 Tony Awards
• Best Musical
• Best Composer and Lyricist: Kander & Ebb
• Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Joel Grey
• Best Featured Actress in a Musical: Peg Murray
• Best Direction of a Musical: Hal Prince
• 1973 Academy Awards
• Best Actress: Liza Minnelli
• Best Supporting Actor: Joel Grey
• Best Film Director: Bob Fosse
• 1998 Tony Awards
• Best Revival of a Musical
• Best Actor in a Musical: Alan Cumming
• Best Actress in a Musical: Natasha Richardson
• Best Featured Actor in a Musical: Ron Rifkin
• 1998 Drama Desk Awards
• Outstanding Revival of a Musical
• Outstanding Actor in a Musical
• Outstanding Actress in a Musical

I Am A Camera: Christopher Isherwood & Berlin

CHRISTOPHER BRADSHAW ISHERWOOD (August 26, 1904 - January 4, 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist. Born in Northwest England, Isherwood spent his childhood in various towns where his British Army father was stationed. Isherwood attended Cambridge, but left without a degree in 1925. In 1928-29 he studied medicine at King's College London, but gave it up after six months to visit Berlin.

Rejecting his upper class background and attracted to men, he remained in Berlin, drawn by its reputation for sexual freedom. There he heard of cabaret legend Anita Berber on stage, and met Jean Ross, the inspirations for his character Sally Bowles. He worked as a private tutor in English while writing a series of short stories collected as Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

The novel describes pre-Nazi Germany and the people that he met. It is episodic, with a large cast over and takes place between late 1930 to early 1933. It is comprised of six short novellas. Published in 1939, it highlights the groups of people who would be most at risk from Nazi intimidation. It was described by contemporary writer George Orwell (1984) as "Brilliant sketches of a society in decay."

The plot? Moving to Germany, Isherwood becomes involved with many different German citizens: The caring landlady, Fraulein Schroeder; the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles, a young English woman who sings in the local cabaret; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling to accept their sexuality in light of the rise of the Nazis.

The novel was adapted into a Broadway play called I Am A Camera by John Van Druten (1951). The title is taken from the novel's first page... "I am a camera with its shutter open." It was from this stage adaptation that the musical Cabaret was derived. Interestingly, the word CABARET is derived from the Latin CAMERA, meaning a small room. Isherwood died in 1986 in Santa Monica, CA from prostate cancer.

Who Was The Real Sally Bowles

THE DEMON: The first inspiration for Sally Bowles, (who first appeared in Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories), is partly based on the popular cabaret artist ANITA BERBER. By the time she was 16, she had moved to Berlin and made her debut as a cabaret dancer. By 1918 she was working in film, and she began dancing nude in 1919. She was scandalous, androgynous and infamous, quickly making a name for herself. Her performances broke boundaries. Berber's overt cocaine use and ambiguous sexuality were matters of public record in pre-Hitler Germany. She could often be seen in Berlin's hotel lobbies, nightclubs and casinos walking naked beneath her sable furs, removing the barriers between what was performance and normal life. At the age of 29 she was diagnosed with severe tuberculosis while performing in the Mideast. She was invalided home and died on November 10, 1928 after a collapse in Damascus, Syria.

THE SAINT: The second inspiration for Sally Bowles (attributed to Isherwood himself) was JEAN ROSS, a singing free spirit and flatmate of his during his Berlin sojourn. Their neighborhood was the center of the city's bohemian community. The territory and early 30's timing of Isherwood's and her life are exactly the same as that of his famous characters, Bradshaw and Bowles. However, Jean Ross was not exactly Sally Bowles: the real-life model was an occasional cabaret artist (and not especially a good one), who later became a journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War from the Republican side. She went on to raise a daughter who became a barrister. Later in life she questioned whether or not she was indeed Isherwood's inspiration at all.

Regardless, Sally Bowles remains the most vivid character in all of Isherwood's Berlin stories.

Pre-War German Cabaret

Cabaret is a theatrical form featuring a mixture of individual numbers, dances, poems, songs, comic monologues, impersonations, sketches, and one-acts. The history of the cabaret form is impossible to imagine without Germany. Begun in Paris around 1880, cabaret soon travelled East to Berlin, Prague, and Moscow. European society was strongly affected by the First World War. Having survived those horrors, audiences in these countries were not ready for serious performances in the legitimate theatre and were delighted with an entertainment that allowed them a certain decadent freedom.

The German public enjoyed the variety provided by cabaret with its diversity of genres and topics: sex, fashion, culture and politics. Some cabaret artists addressed the growing strength of the Nazi party, but they misjudged the magnitude of the threat. Despite the brutality of the street violence in 1931, some responded by continuing to dismiss Hitler as a buffoon who had little chance of success. When Hitler took power in 1933, cabaret was one of the first victims. Several writers and performers were arrested and taken to concentration camps. Others left Germany for America or other parts of Europe.

The cabaret business was ultimately destroyed by the Nazi party. Much of their entertainers and staff had either been liberal, leftist, or Jewish or gay. These people were the first to be persecuted. In 1937, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels banned all political themes from German stages. In 1941, he went even further, signing an order in which he stated: "Any performance or commentary is immediately forbidden for the entire public. It makes no difference whether it means to deal with matters of politics, economy, culture, or any other concerns of public or private life."

Third Reich: The Politics of Cabaret

The plot of Cabaret occurs during the transition between the Weimar Republic and Hitler's Third Reich. Following Germany's defeat in World War I, a national assembly convened in the city of Weimar, where a new constitution for Germany was written. This first attempt to establish a liberal democracy in Germany ultimately failed with the ascent of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in 1930. Why?

After losing World War I, the Germans were forced to pay reparation debts to other countries. In most part of the 1920s, they were saddled with making good on their defeat. When the world market crashed in 1929, German money (Deutsche Mark) became basically worthless.

Complicating matters, Berlin in the late 1920's was rife with political struggle and moral vice. The deregulated social structures quickly led to the flourishing of avant-garde art, cosmopolitanism, and sexual pleasure. The beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 exacerbated the situation by increasing unemployment, political extremism, and human intolerance. As a result, the country swiftly veered towards nationalism and fascism, which were state policy with Hitler's Nazi Party coming to power in 1933.

A decorated veteran of World War I, ADOLF HITLER joined the Nazi Party in 1919 and became its leader in 1921. Following his imprisonment after a failed coup in Bavaria in 1923, he gained support by promoting German Nationalism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda. Hitler ultimately wanted to establish a new order of absolute Nazi German power throughout Europe. To gain this, he pursued a policy with the declared goal of seizing living space for the Aryan people, directing all his German resources towards this goal.

Sadly, he came close to achieving this.

Hitler's Nazi Legacy

EUTHANSIA:

Hitler stated in 1929... "if a million children are born in a year, and 800,000 of the weakest and unworthy are eliminated, the end result will be the strengthening of the population." Nazis systematically murdered as many as 200,000 mentally and physically challenged, in order to cleanse and purify the German race.

THE PINK TRIANGLE:

(German: Der Rosa Winkel) was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners in concentration camps who were sent there because of their homosexuality. Every prisoner had to wear a triangle on their jacket, the color of which was to categorize them according "to his kind."

DEATH OF THOSE CLASSIFIED AS SUB-HUMAN:

3,000,000 Polish Jews. | 3,000,000 Non-Polish Jews. | Thousands of Gypsies, Gays, Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as Communists, Socialists, and National Pacifists. | 3,300,000 Russian Prisoners of War. | The master plan for Eastern Europe (according to Hitler's Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler) necessitated the elimination of 30,000,000 Slavic people.

WORLD WAR II, SOBERING STATISTICS:

42,000,000 Dead: 16 Million military casualties, 26 Million civilian casualties. Over 50% of the dead and wounded are Russian. The Soviet Union lost close to 10% of its population.

Barn Players Cabaret Dramaturgy © 2009
Edited by Ross Harmon