Until Liza Minnelli burst on to the stage of the Kit Kat Club in Bob Fosse’s
Cabaret (1972), the movie musical had become a turn-off for a public conditioned by the naturalism of television. But here was a viscerally powerful story set in the seductively decadent world of Weimar Berlin with Nazism brewing in the background. Here was a musical for grown-ups.
Minnelli, dressed to kill in stockings and suspenders, is Sally Bowles, the American showgirl who shares her lover, the English writer Brian Roberts (Michael York), with an aristocrat, Max (Helmut Griem). This performance of a lifetime allowed Minnelli to shake off the shadow of her mother, Judy Garland. “Watching Liza take the stage as Sally was a magic moment,” recalls York. “It was wonderful to see her seize her destiny.”
Sally had been born in Christopher Isherwood’s novella Sally Bowles, about an amoral English singer in Berlin, included in his collection, The Berlin Stories. Another tale in that collection, about a gigolo who admits he is Jewish to win the heart of an heiress, provided the basis for John van Druten’s play I Am a Camera, first staged in 1951 and filmed in 1955. Then, in 1966, the producer/director Hal Prince scored a Broadway hit with Cabaret, a musical version by the composer John Kander, lyricist Fred Ebb and writer Joe Masteroff.
Masteroff expanded the role of Sally’s German landlady, inventing a romance with a Jewish storeowner. This also allowed Prince’s production a link to 1930s Berlin with the casting of Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill’s widow, as the landlady. With her as the touchstone, Kander and Ebb conjured echoes of the Weill/Bertolt Brecht collaborations. As Lenya said of Cabaret’s score: “When I sing those songs, it is Berlin.”
“Originally the cabaret songs were going to be a prelude to the main drama,” Masteroff explains. “But the club MC’s number Willkommen suggested to Hal a metaphor for the entire show. So the cabaret songs became a running thread. But since Hal thought that Sally was the least interesting character in Berlin Stories, this remained an ensemble show.”
When Fosse came to the film he kept the cabaret milieu, as well as Joel Grey as the Kit Kat Club’s leering lord of misrule. But Fosse dropped the non-cabaret songs — “I get angsty watching musicals in which people are singing as they walk down the street. It looks silly” — except for the anthem Tomorrow Belongs to Me, performed chillingly by patrons in a sunny beer garden. People who normally hate musicals love Cabaret because Fosse made sure that everyone has a solidly naturalistic reason to sing.
The playwrights Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler also replaced the landlady’s romance with the gigolo subplot. Isherwood’s writer alter ego, who had been American, straight and called Clifford in Van Druten’s version, was now English, bisexual and renamed Brian. Most significantly, Fosse expanded Sally’s role with such new songs as Mein Herr and Maybe This Time. And singing them was Minnelli, who had auditioned 14 times for the Broadway role. Prince had objected to her because Sally was meant to be English and a deluded second-rater, not the knockout entertainer Minnelli so plainly is in the film. But the doubts fade when you see her and Grey in Fosse’s showstoppingly sexy dance sequences.
“Bob was always improvising. He kept us boiling with energy and I think it shows,” says York. But York soon realised after arriving in Munich for filming that “Brian was literally this ‘I am a camera’ figure, a passive observer. I raised my concerns with Bob and we had this extraordinary week, during which he was rehearsing the dances and laying down the soundtrack, when this opaque character became flesh and blood."
Fosse was also keen on field research. He and Minnelli ended up in Hamburg’s red light district and a sex club featuring mud wrestling lesbians and audience participation. Minnelli then took York and his wife to another club where they overheard the manager berating one of his American "artists" for failing to rise to the challenge of his contractual obligations. “There was nothing sexy about re-creating prewar decadence,” says York, who was grateful to get home for some soup, a book and bed.
During the shoot, Minnelli enchanted the crew with her vivacity, but she was unpredictable. On bad days she would rave and collapse, resulting in a search for air sickness pills or something stronger. Living on a diet of cola and crisps didn’t help.
Fosse was also under pressure. York describes men in suits on set looking at their watches and telling the director to get on with things: “Bob was a Broadway legend, but his film of Sweet Charity had bombed,” York says. “He had to prove himself as a film director.”
When Cabaret opened no one was sure how it would fare; Hugh Wheeler left a screening saying: “This is either very good or very bad.” The film went on to win eight Oscars, including awards for Minnelli, Grey and Fosse (as Best Director, beating Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather). But its success cast a long shadow over York, who found all the scripts offered him after Cabaret were for “homosexual introspective Englishman. That ’s why I was so pleased to play D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers — lusty and very heterosexual!” But he seems content with having the credit in his CV, even recording an audiobook of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin last year. Even so, he says that he still doesn’t know why the film and show have endured as well as they have.
Joe Masteroff, still writing musicals in his eighties, may have the answer to that one: “Cabaret,” he says, “is about clinging to your world even as it crumbles around you. That theme never goes out of date.”
