A sharp, high quality 2k upscale using the DVD transfer of the original TV proshot of this fantastic show. This is the UK television taping of the early version of the famous 1998 and 2014 staging that completely changed the interpretation and mood for all future revivals of the show.
Sam Mendes's production opened Dec. 9 1993 inside the devastating intimacy of Covent Garden's tiny Donmar Warehouse. While this musical set in pre-Hitler Berlin always transcended Broadway glitz, Mendes regarded Hal Prince's original conception as "a minor masterpiece'' dependent upon "an unholy marriage, as it were, between Germany and Broadway.'' And while he admired Bob Fosse's 1972 film, Mendes was out for something different - "a laying bare of what's at the core of the piece.''
In a role immortalized by Liza Minnelli's 1972 Academy Award-winning turn, Jane Horrocks played expatriate English entertainer Sally Bowles, and Alan Cumming inherited Joel Grey's celebrated part as the Kit Kat Klub's Emcee, the leering embodiment of a decadent age. Adam Godley was Cliff, the American writer through whose eyes the story is told. Whereas the 1987 Broadway revival of "Cabaret'' swallowed millions, the Donmar production was costing a scant $195,000.
Mendes hit on a terrific concept for his production: He transformed his theater into a nightclub. The audience sat at little tables with red lamps. And the performers were truly seedy. He told the actors playing the Kit Kat Club girls not to shave their armpits or their legs. “Unshaved armpits—it sent shock waves around the theater,” he recalls. Since there was no room—or money—for an orchestra, the actors played the instruments. Some of them could hit the right notes.
To play the Emcee, Mendes cast Alan Cumming, a young Scottish actor whose comedy act Mendes had enjoyed. “Can you sing?” Mendes asked him. “Yeah,” Cumming said. Mendes threw ideas at him and “he was open to everything.” Just before the first preview, Mendes suggested he come out during the intermission and chat up the audience, maybe dance with a woman. Mendes, frantic before the preview, never got around to giving Cumming any more direction than that. No matter. Cumming sauntered onstage as people were settling back at their tables, picked a man out of the crowd, and started dancing with him. “Watch your hands,” he said. “I lead.”
Cumming’s Emcee was impish, fun, gleefully licentious. The audience loved him. “I have never had less to do with a great performance in one of my shows than I had to do with Alan,” Mendes says.
When Joe Masteroff came to see the show in London, Mendes was nervous. He’d taken plenty of liberties with the script. Cliff, the narrator, was now openly gay. (One night, when Cliff kissed a male lover, a man in the audience shouted, “Rubbish!”) And he made the Emcee a victim of the Nazis. In the final scene, Cumming, in a concentration camp uniform affixed with a yellow Star of David and a pink triangle, is jolted, as if he’s thrown himself onto the electrified fence at Birkenau.
“I should be really pissed with you,” Masteroff told Mendes after the show. “But it works.” Kander liked it too, though he was not happy that the actors didn’t play his score all that well. Ebb hated it. “He wanted more professionalism,” Mendes says. “And he was not wrong. There was a dangerous edge of amateurishness about it.” This very vulgar and bold approach to the material is what made it hit the nerve of the times again, but in its very own way, showing the dark abysses directly and mercilessly for the first time. The Kit Kat Club becomes a place for outcasts, big dreamers, losers and prostitutes. The lack of talent of the singers and dancers is not only a fresh contrast to the always perfect grande glitz and glam of Broadway, but a sign of the blindness and living conditions of the artists of the Weimar Republic, perfect for the book and music of this show.
Music: John Kander
Lyrics: Fred Ebb
Book: Joe Masteroff
Director: Sam Mendes
Choreography: Lea Anderson
Scenery/Costumes: Sue Blane
Lighting: Paul Pyant
Alan Cumming (Emcee), Jane Horrocks (Sally Bowles), Sara Kestelman (Fräulein Schneider), Adam Godley (Clifford Bradshaw), Charlotte Medcalf (Fraulein Kost), Michael Gardiner (Ernst Ludwig)
