The Real CABARET

Being on a musicals kick lately, I went searching on YouTube and found a taste of what must have been one of the finest theatrical productions of the '60s: the original Cabaret as directed by Hal Prince -- his first real hit as a director -- and choreographed by Ron Field. This is from the London production, which unexpectedly and successfully cast Judi Dench as Sally Bowles (she also did Frau Schneider's songs on John Yap's studio recording a decade back); she isn't really a singer, but Sally doesn't have to have a particularly good singing voice, since there's a lot of leeway as to how good or bad a cabaret performer she's supposed to be.

While this number doesn't really convey the impact of the production, it does convey a sense of the approach, which was halfway between a realistic, representational approach and the "concept" musical that would soon become the norm; the cabaret was a set, but it also existed in a separate world from the rest of the story and commented on what was happening. Several of the cabaret numbers are direct comments on songs that the characters have already sung in the book scenes: "Perfectly Marvelous," where Sally moves in with Cliff, is followed by "Two Ladies," where the MC delivers his own spin on unconventional living arrangements, and the MC's song "If You Could See Her" is a satirical response to "Meeskite," Herr Schultz's optimistic song about how looks don't matter. (This is why the changed line "She isn't a meeskite at all" works much better than "She wouldn't look Jewish at all.") Then there are Sally's cabaret numbers, "Don't Tell Mama" and the title song, which are halfway between the two worlds.

The interplay between story songs and commentary songs was completely lost in the movie because of the absurd decision to drop all the non-diegetic songs. There are other reasons I don't like the movie version, which I went into a few years back, but it's not just the movie's fault that Cabaret keeps getting rewritten, even though the original version was just about perfect as it was. It's also that Prince felt the original didn't go far enough, and kept trying to push the musical form even farther with his subsequent musicals with Stephen Sondheim (none of which are as effective as theatre, or as writing, as Cabaret). So it's often assumed that certain of the less-daring elements of Cabaret need to be changed to be more in line with the riskier, more experimental shows that followed it, except that it never works.

For example, it's true that making the hero, Cliff, a heterosexual character represented a failure of nerve. But that's the way they wrote him, and Joe Masteroff's excellent libretto is built around the idea that he's hetereosexual and infatuated with Sally. Rewriting the character causes the plot to fall apart (the movie, as much as I don't like it, at least had the sense to create a new plot and new characters). And such dramatically essential songs as Cliff's "Why Should I Wake Up," Schultz's "Meeskite" (a key theatrical moment at the end of the first act, and a song without which the MC's "If You Could See Her" has no reason to exist) and the show-stopping "Telephone" dance (considered the best number in the original show by those who saw it) are often dropped or minimized because stagers are viewing it through the prism of the movie or subsequent musicals.

Finally, the important thing about the original Cabaret is that with Field's glamorous choreography very much defining the evening, and with the showgirls presented as beautiful and appealing, the original version presented the cabaret as very similar to the world of a typical Broadway musical: not a seedy, dingy place like most subsequent versions have tried to make it, but a place where people really would be lured into forgetting their troubles. That was the whole point of the show, which attempted to give the story contemporary significance by turning it into a sort of meta-commentary on entertainment in general and musicals in particular. The MC and the cabaret girls take real issues (that we've seen played out in the regular book scenes) and trivialize them, or turn them into glitzy diversions, using music and glitz and beauty to numb us into forgetting what's really going on out there in the world. There have been other musicals that tried to make a similar point: Prince's own Follies and Bob Fosse's Chicago, but neither of those shows have as good a book as Cabaret, and neither one was as big a hit. Someone really needs to dust off the original 1966 version of Cabaret (including the wonderful Don Walker orchestrations that strike a perfect balance between tinny cabaret style and the big Broadway sound) and bring back the powerful, meaningful piece of theatre that has been compromised by all the subsequent, inferior versions.

Little Red Hat

I've been listening to the 1999 studio recording of the complete score of 110 in the Shade, probably the best recording in producer John Yap's now-defunct series of studio cast albums. Yap, the head of the British label That's Entertainment, made (with the British musical/operetta conductor John Owen Edwards) two-disc recordings of a bunch of post-1944 musicals, using the original orchestrations and all the incidental music, reprises, etc. He called off the series when the CD market collapsed, and there are a few recordings he made but never released, most notably a recording of Kurt Weill's One Touch Of Venus.

Many of the recordings are more interesting for teaching value than listening value -- that is, they're great learning tools for anyone who is putting on one of these shows and wants to hear all the dance music et al, but many of them sound under-rehearsed and untheatrical. But there are some very valuable recordings in the series, either for individual performances (Alec McCowen in the two-disc My Fair Lady may be the only Higgins who actually sings his songs instead of speaking through them all, and it works amazingly well) or an alternative to the original (his Most Happy Fella is not as well-sung as the original, but it's a good performance and the only place to hear Don Walker's orchestrations in stereo sound).

The 110 In the Shade was the only recording since the original (which is better sung overall, but out of print), and since it includes two principals from the '90s New York City Opera production, it has a more theatrical feel than most of the other recordings in the series, and is far preferable to the re-orchestrated, miscast Audra McDonald revival.

The show itself, an adaptation of N. Richard Nash's The Rainmaker (Nash adapted the script himself) stands somewhere between classic and cult classic. It was the first Broadway score by the team of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, of the Off-Broadway hit The Fantasticks. They were both big fans of the original play, especially, Jones, who first saw it in its original incarnation, as a TV play. (It then became a stage play, a film, and a Broadway musical.) Perhaps because they loved the play so much, most of the songs in 110 In the Shade come directly from Nash's script about a con man who claims he can bring rain to a drought-ridden town -- sort of a meaner Harold Hill -- and a single woman who doubts her own womanliness. Almost every song originates in a line of dialogue or a whole speech from the play. The con man's big speech in The Rainmaker about queen Melisande, whose husband went forth to win a "golden fleece" for her, becomes a song about the exact same thing. Here's the speech from the original:

STARBUCK with a sudden inspiration): Just a minute, Lizzie -- just one little half of a minute! I got the greatest name for you -- the greatest name -- just listen! (Then, like a love lyric) Melisande.

LIZZIE (flatly): I don't like it.

STARBUCK: That's because you don't know anything about her! But when I tell you who she was -- lady, when I tell you who she was!

LIZZIE: Who?

STARBUCK: She was the most beautiful --! She was the beautiful wife of King Hamlet! -- Ever hear of him?

LIZZIE (giving him rope): Go on! -- go on!

STARBUCK: He was the fella who sailed across the ocean and brought back the Golden Fleece! And you know why he did that? Because Queen Melisande begged him for it! I tell you, that Melisande -- she was so beautiful and her hair was so long and curly -- every time he looked at her he just fell right down and died! And this King Hamlet, he'd do anything for her -- anything she wanted! So when she said: "Hamlet, I got a terrible hankerin' for a soft Golden Fleece," he just naturally sailed right off to find it! And when he came back -- all bleedin' and torn -- he went and laid that Fleece of Gold right down at her pretty white feet! And she took that fur piece and she wrapped it around her pink naked shoulders and she said: "I got the Golden Fleece -- and I'll never be cold no more!" -- Melisande! What a woman! What a name!!

And here's the song from the musical, which is basically the same speech with one addition (a description of how King Hamlet got the Fleece):

Melisande
Uploaded by carpalton

Sure, the music gives an extra dimension to the scene, but in dramatic terms, it doesn't do much that the nonmusical play didn't. That's a problem with the show that keeps it from completely working, even though the songs themselves are nearly all very good. Some stage adaptations simply musicalize moments that worked perfectly well in dialogue, and this is one of them. And when that happens, the songs often have the feeling of being over-long versions of something that could just as easily be said in dialogue; even if the audience doesn't know the original, they'll sense it. My Fair Lady is a stage adaptation where most of the dialogue is from the play (or the 1938 movie), but most of the songs don't correspond to speeches from the play. It uses song to say things that the play didn't say, because if the play said it effectively, why put it in song at all? But a lot of the songs from 110 In the Shade, as good as they are, have the feel of stage dialogue given a few rhymes and set to music -- because that's what they are. And the problem would have been even worse except that, on the road, the songwriters added two new songs that were not merely transcriptions of a scene from the original play and instead offered something new. The ballad "A Man and a Woman" (giving a key scene a new depth of feeling that it didn't have in the play). And while the comic quartet "Poker Polka" is based on a scene from the play, it gives a much funnier spin on that scene and a different take on the character of Sheriff File.

(In The Rainmaker, part of the scene)
H.C.: How's your poker, File?

FILE: My what?

H.C.: Poker.

FILE: Oh, I don't like poker much.

JIM: You don't?! Don't you like Spit in the Ocean?!

FILE: Not much.

H.C.: We figured to ask you to play some cards.

FILE: I gave up cards a long time ago,

H.C. (stymied): You did, huh?

FILE: M-hm.

Poker Polka
Uploaded by carpalton

Here's one song that is basically a dialogue transcription but does expand a little on the dialogue that it's based on, "Little Red Hat," the eleven o'clock number for the secondary young couple, Jimmy and Snookie (who was played in the original 1963 production by a very young Lesley Ann Warren). Nash's play lends itself so well to musicalization that it even had the then-obligatory secondary comic couple in it. The song is based on Jimmy's story of how he got engaged to Snookie and asserted his independence from his brother Noah:

JIM: We went ridin' -- yep, that's right! We opened that Essex up and we went forty million miles an hour! And then we stopped that car and we got out and we sat down under a great big tree! And we got out and we sat down under a great big tree! And we could look through the branches and see the sky all full of stars -- damn, it was full of stars. And I turned around and I kissed her. I kissed her once, I kissed her a hundred times! And while I was doin' that, I knew I could carry her any where -- right straight to the moon! But all the time, I kept thinkin': ''Noah's gonna come along and he's gonna say 'whoa!' He's gonna say: 'Jim, you're dumb! You're so dumb you ain't got sense enough to say whoa to yourself— so I'm sayin' it for you— Whoa!'" But Noah didn't show up— and I kept right on kissin'. And then somethin' happened. She was cryin' and I was cryin' and I thought any minute now we'll be right up there on the moon. And then— then!— without Noah bein' there— all by my smart little self— I said whoa!

HC: Yippeeeeee!

JIM: Thank you, Pop -- your yippee is accepted.

NOAH: I don't believe a word of it. Why'd she give you the hat?

JIM: For the same reason I give her my elk's tooth! We're engaged!

The song adds a little to this, partly by having Snookie tell the story along with Jimmy, but partly because it very strongly suggests that he was about to rape her until he told himself "whoa!" I suppose the suggestion is unintentional, but by cutting the line where he suggests that it was consensual ("I knew I could carry her anywhere"), and adding the line about "pinnin' her flat," it sounds like an assault scene that is interrupted when the assaulter has second thoughts. Howard Taubman, the theatre critic for the New York Times (and the only critic who didn't like the show), really hated this song and what he thought to be its implications, writing: "This duet is meant to be exuberant and racy; it emerges as a kind of distasteful theme song for vulgar theater suited to a world of debased values."

Not that I think this is actually a song about rape. (Nor, for that matter, is the same authors' song in The Fantasticks that keeps getting into trouble because it uses the word "rape" -- the word is used in the old-fashioned sense, to mean "abduction.") Just that it has some phrases in it whose implications maybe weren't quite thought through. It's still a great number.

Little Red Hat
Uploaded by carpalton