Wednesday 7 August 2019

Song

The more famous the show tune, the less we remember its context in the show. "Cabaret," for instance. Here it is, the wonderful Kander/Ebb song, aced by Liza Minelli in the '72 movie.

In the play, Sally Bowles--the Kit Kat showgirl, I think meant to be far less polished than Minelli--ignores the rise of the Nazis in pre-war Berlin. Let others resist or, like her American (in the play) British (in the movie) boyfriend, flee. She'll stay working at the club. In fact, she's due at a rehearsal right now.

Politics don't matter, she believes, even when the nightmare looms. They're throwing bricks through windows of Jewish sympathizers, lovers are torn apart, Sally's had an abortion . . .

So in the play she comes on stage and does the song and says her piece. More than a call to seize the pleasures of the moment, the song expresses her fear, defiance, hope, cowardice, fate, force, innocence, blindness, strength.

One measure of how big this song became outside of the show is that later productions moved it to the top. In its original spot, near the Act Two climax of the piece, the song takes us to the heart of the character at the moment of greatest crisis.


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