The precipitous fall from grace
Published 8:00 am Thursday, September 30, 2004
Europe on the verge World War II is the setting, but audiences shouldn’t expect hills alive with the sound of music.
The saccharine gives way to the cynical in Bainbridge Performing Arts’ production of “Cabaret,” the John Kander and Fred Ebb musical that opens the 2004-05 theater season Oct. 8 at the Playhouse.
“Cabaret” spans the rise of the Nazis and the waning years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, famed for a boistrous avant-garde, uninhibited sexuality and the notorious nightclubs that helped win Berlin the moniker “Babylon of the World.”
“Berlin was one of the most decadent, hedonistic and exciting cities in the world during this time,” director Steven Fogell said. “Most clubs used very provocative and sexually explicit stage shows to lure all of Berlin’s elite and common crowds.
“It was a time of sexual experimentation; drugs and alcohol were easily accessible and prostitution was a way of life for many women and men of all ages.”
The original production of “Cabaret,” which opened on Broadway in 1966, was based on John Van Druten’s “I Am a Camera,” a 1957 play derived from English author Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.”
Isherwood’s writing was semi-autobiographical, a distillation of his years in prewar Berlin. The stories detailed the sad lives of the flotsam and jetsam left floundering at the shoreline of German society as Weimar ebbed, a place that would be wiped clean by the Nazi juggernaut.
“Cabaret” was made into a movie in 1972 directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minelli and Joel Grey, but the BPA production is closer in spirit to Isherwood’s writing and a subsequent 1987 Broadway revival than to the popular movie, reinstating songs that had been cut from the film.
“In (the movie) ‘Cabaret,’ it’s an upbeat setting and you truly believe people are enjoying themselves,” Fogell said. “In our show, the songs get darker and darker.”
Isherwood’s proto-self, Cliff Bradshaw, meets struggling actress Sally Bowles who performs at the Kit Kat Klub. Bowles, self-delusion on legs, wants to be the star she’ll never be.
“She’s always looking for the buck, she’ll sleep with anyone she thinks might further her career,” said Kim Atkins, who plays Bowles. “She’s liberated in one sense, but she’s the prisoner of her own world.”
Fired from the bottom-of-the-heap club, Bowles swiftly moves in on the naive Bradshaw, played by Guy Sidora.
The move is no metaphor; she turns up on the doorstep of the room he rents from a Fraulein Schneider, with bag in hand.
The musical splices the world of the rooming-house residents with the onstage antics at the Kit Kat Klub.
Gary Reed as the Emcee points out the foibles of the cast of characters. Reed is a combination of late-night show host – up on contemporary issues, puncturing pretension with sarcasm and humor – and ringmaster.
“You’re the one who says ‘hey, look over there,’” he said. “I’d want to know everything that’s going on, who’s doing what, and comment on it.”
Reed choreographed the dance numbers with actors in black lace, garters, bowler hats and not much more, the moves echoing the sexual energy of the Bob Fosse signature.
The play compresses time; as Nazi power grows, the Kit Kat Klub is both a refuge from, and a microcosm of, society’s deterioration.
“It’s all about power, how sex is used for power, how money is used for power,” said Karen Harp-Reed, who plays Fraulein Schneider, a German in love with Jewish grocer Herr Schultz played by Bart Berg.
Schneider is important, Harp-Reed believes, because she represents the face of the ordinary German who allowed the Nazi rise to power and the Holocaust.
Battered by World War I, the overly punitive Treaty of Versailles that concluded that conflict, and the massive unemployment and inflation of the Depression that hit Germany in the 1920s, Schneider, like many other “ordinary” Germans, is simply putting one foot in front of the other.
“I think she is the face of the common German,” Harp-Reed said. “War, revolution, inflation – she’s survived them and she is trying to survive day to day. She has to make a choice (of breaking off the relationship with Schultz) or lose everything she’s gained.
“So she turns away.”
Sally Bowles makes the choice to turn away from the domesticity proffered by Bradshaw for the empty illusion of her “career.”
Most of the characters face choices and their lives are altered by the play’s end, Fogell says, and not for the better.
And theater-goers are not exempt; the play makes the point that there are no innocent bystanders. One of the cleverest features of the show is the co-option of the Playhouse audience into voyeuristic complicity with Kit Kat Klub-goers onstage.
“The Kit Kat Klub is showing you all the things that are happening in larger society and how we watch it for entertainment,” Harp-Reed said. “There is a parallel to today.
“All of us are pretty clear that it’s a good time to do this (show).”
