| re: Cabaret this week--I think I enjoyed it. | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 05:55 pm EDT 05/17/24 | |
| In reply to: re: Cabaret this week--I think I enjoyed it. - Singapore/Fling 01:42 pm EDT 05/17/24 | |
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| Just to clarify things for folks here, there were sex clubs in Berlin at the time where patrons could have sex with the performers, who were basically prostitutes. It seems to me that the creators of Cabaret did not intend the Kit Kat Klub to be one of those establishments. They may not have known there were such establishments in Berlin at that time. These places were not called cabarets by Berliners at that time, at least not according to a long 1974 article in the New York Times. Actually, the club in Cabaret also would not have been called a cabaret by Berliners. According to Wolfgang Roth, who lived in Berlin at the time and is quoted in the article, the club in Cabaret would have been considered a tanzhalle (dance hall) by Berliners. Roth did not get terribly specific about what kinds of performances were seen in these clubs, but he directly stated that the club in Cabaret would have been considered a tanzhalle. There were phones in these clubs and also pneumatic tubes for sending messages to someone a patron liked. Although you could hook up in these clubs, they were not sex clubs. You could not have sex on the premises, and I don’t think the patrons or the performers were generally prostitutes. The establishments that were considered cabarets were where songs by composers like Hollaender and Spoliansky were sung, and where sketches by such writers as Brecht, Wedekind and Tucholsky were performed, where the material performed were satirical songs, sketches and monologues, and arty songs, and where a high level of performers could be seen, some of them famous. It seemed to me in the Mendes-Marshall production that this was a club where sex was available on the premises with the performers. At the time I saw the first version of the production with the original cast, I thought this was historically inaccurate, but I now know that such clubs did exist in Berlin at that time. I don't think that was the original intention of the writers and Hal Prince in 1966, but times change, and I guess if the writers approved of this, what can you say? Since it seemed to me that was the case in the Mendes-Marshall production, I guess all three writers did approve, but perhaps they did not perceive it that way. If it is more explicit in the current production, it’s hard to know what the four original creators would have felt since only Kander is still around. Of course, it is possible that the Times was not fully correct about these things and perhaps there are some books where all of this is discussed in still more detail than in the Times article, which is pretty detailed but not a book. |
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