Content area
Full Text
How Roundabout Theatre Company's 1998 revival of Cabaret transformed two notorious dance clubs into legit Broadway theatres
CABARET BEGAN IN HAL PRINCE'S APARTMENT. It happened two weeks before John Kander and Fred Ebb's ill-fated musical Flora the Red Menace opened in New York. The songwriting duo met at the home of their producer, who was itching to start the next project.
"Cabaret was really Hal Prince's idea," Kander proclaims. Bookwriter Joe Masteroff elaborates: "We never thought the show would be a big success, because it had a very unhappy ending. And Broadway musicals didn't have unhappy endings in those days. It was unthinkable," he says flatly. "When the show first opened in Boston on its tryout, during the first few performances before the reviews came out, people would leave mid-show because they knew the title was Cabaret, and they assumed that it was going to be just that. Once the reviews came out, people stopped leaving, because they knew what to expect-but those first few audiences were very disappointed."
Well, Prince's idea turned out to be right on the money, and the show opened to great acclaim on Broadway in 1966. The rest is history, one might be inclined to say, but that observation would prove premature.
Flash forward almost 30 years, and enter Sam Mendes, a little-known British director staging what had by then become a Kander-Ebb classic at London's Donmar Warehouse. That production, celebrated for wrapping its audience in a danceclub ambience with the actors also serving as the band, would go on to New York, making Mendes and his Broadway collaborator Rob Marshall two of the most in-demand directors in die business, and turning the show's Emcee, Alan Cumming, into a household name. While changing the fate of its creators, that particular production of Cabaret also changed the face of New York theatre-two notorious faces in particular, thanks to the show's required environment.
So, in honor of yet another return of Cabaret-which opened on Broadway this past April in the same production, starring Cumming and helmed by Mendes and MarshallAmerican Theatre talked to Roundabout artistic director Todd Haimes and members of the original team to get a behind-the-scenes, timeline-annotated look at the little show that could.
DEC. 2,1993: A revival of...