Cabaret is a musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff. It is based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten, which in turn was based on the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.
Set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis rise to power, the musical focuses on the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub and revolves around American writer Clifford Bradshaw's relations with English cabaret performer Sally Bowles. A subplot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, and the club itself serves as a metaphor for ominous political developments in late Weimar Germany.
The original Broadway production opened on November 20, 1966, at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City and became a box office hit that ran for 1,166 performances. The award-winning musical inspired numerous subsequent productions as well as the 1972 film of the same name.
Background
Historical basis
The events depicted in the 1966 musical are derived from Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood's autobiographical tales of his colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic. In 1929, Isherwood visited Weimar-era Berlin during the final months of the Golden Twenties. He relocated to Berlin to avail himself of boy prostitutes and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets. He socialized with a coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles, and W.H. Auden. At the time, Isherwood viewed the rise of fascism in Germany with political indifference and instead focused on writing his first novel.
In Berlin, Isherwood shared modest lodgings with 19-year-old British flapper Jean Ross, an aspiring film actress who earned her living as a chanteuse in lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets. While room-mates at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg, Isherwood settled into a same-sex relationship with a young German man, and Ross became pregnant after engaging in a series of sexual liaisons. She believed the father of the child to be jazz pianist and later film actor Peter van Eyck.
As a personal favor to Ross, Isherwood pretended to be her heterosexual impregnator in order to facilitate an abortion procedure. Ross nearly died as a result of the botched abortion due to the doctor's incompetence. Following the procedure, Isherwood visited an ailing Ross in a Berlin hospital. Wrongly assuming the shy gay author to be her heterosexual partner, the hospital staff despised him for forcing Ross to undergo a near-fatal abortion. These tragicomic events later inspired Isherwood to write his 1937 novella Sally Bowles and serves as its narrative climax.
While Ross recovered from the botched abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Weimar Germany as the incipient Nazi Party grew stronger day by day. "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled. As Berlin's daily scenes increasingly featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right," Isherwood, Ross, Spender, and other British nationals realized that they must leave the politically volatile country as soon as possible.
Two weeks after Adolf Hitler implemented the Enabling Act which cemented his dictatorship, Isherwood fled Germany and returned to England on April 5, 1933. Afterwards, the Nazis shuttered most of Berlin's seedy cabarets, and many of Isherwood's cabaret acquaintances fled abroad or perished in concentration camps. These events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin stories. In 1951, playwright John Van Druten adapted Isherwood's 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin into the Broadway play I Am a Camera which in turn became a 1955 film starring Laurence Harvey and Julie Harris.