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Cabaret Information

The burgeoning political activism in the United States when Cabaret hit the stage in 1966 – and its growth by 1972 when the film hit theatres – as well as Hal Prince's desire to break through to a new kind of socially responsible musical theatre all conspired to make Cabaret one of the most fascinating stage pieces of the 1960s and a show that speaks to our world in a new millennium more now than at any time since it first opened, as evidenced by the smash hit Broadway revival. The singer Sally Bowles represents the people who kept their eyes shut to changes in the world around them, and the novelist Clifford Bradshaw represents the new (perhaps naïve) breed of American activist who could no longer sit by and watch the government ignore the will of the people. Today, as activism at both ends of the political spectrum has experienced a renaissance in America, Cabaret as a cautionary morality play has tremendous resonance.
Cabaret in its original form was a fascinating but flawed theatre piece. It was director Hal Prince's first experiment in making a concept musical (a show in which the story is secondary to a central message or metaphor), a form he would perfect later on with projects like Company, Follies, Pacific Overtures, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and other musicals. Early in the process of creating Cabaret, Prince had gone to Russia to see theatre and had witnessed a provocative, confrontational, rule-busting production at the Taganka Theatre. It was everything Prince had been looking for. He later said, “The Taganka Theatre was traumatizing (in a good sense).” He would forever more gravitate towards theatre that challenged audiences, that intentionally made audiences uncomfortable, that made an audience confront their world in all its contradictions and ugliness.
Walter Kerr said in the New York Times in 1966 that Cabaret “opens the door to a fresh notion of the bizarre, crackling, harsh and the beguiling uses that can be made of...