Watching a movie on the lawn at night with strangers, hundreds of strangers, is the best way to see some movies. There are moments at an outdoor movie when the film could nearly be projected on the clouds, filling the space overhead, filling our heads with the movie. That’s really seeing the movie.
“CABARET” at Millennium
nan turpin photograph
“Cabaret” was a bold choice for Tuesday night’s movie at Millennium (Pritzker Pavilion, Frank Gehry architecture, etc.) and it’s aged well, music and Bob Fosse’s production. It didn’t seem to matter that part of the audience came for the alfresco of it all and others came to see this movie on a big screen again. The flamboyance of Gehry’s stage architecture the lighting brought a 2013 unity to this audience watching this movie.
The 1972 movie musical had a lineage. It was adapted from the 1966 Broadway musical that came from the 1951 Broadway stage play that came from the 1945 short story collection by the English Christopher Isherwood based on his 1931 Berlin experiences.
Every time this work was adapted, it would reach a new audience, one that knew different worlds and were sensitive to different ideas. The audience of each historical period has its own distinct interests and sensitivities.
Powerful histories emerged in the life of Isherwood’s book, from the post-World War I cultural shocks of the 1920s into the 1930s and economic depression exacerbating political violence, going into the second great war, followed quickly by a “cold war” on the one hand and by a trilogy of sexual and gender revolutions on the other –sexual “liberation” in the 1960s to an organized women’s movement and then to a gay liberation in the 1970s that continues to the present time.
For every format, book, play, film, in the time it was created there were decisions that turned on possible audience. Could investors make their money back if they financed a play, a musical, a Hollywood film? What was there in the historical air of their time that gave them the financial confidence to proceed with each of the projects that grew from what a young Englishman in Berlin had observed and turned into his art all those years before?
There are source links posted below with reminders of historical context of opening nights; for example, the Berlin Wall was built five years before the Broadway musical version of “Cabaret” premiered.
And then we come to 2013 again and this Chicago summer movie, the sudden appearance of the film “Cabaret” in a setting worthy of a science fiction film that a 1931 audience might have gone to see. It is yet another change of historical context for the reception of “Cabaret.”
nan turpin photograph
The “Cabaret” audience in Millennium this week seemed – if random whispers and sympathetic noises are any indication – to have been more concerned by the sexual politics of the movie than by the approaching catastrophe of the war. Different time, different place, different things are important.
Sexual ambiguity and sexual clarity, all in the olden time of the early depression, these were the points of connection with our 2013 audience. They are trained to think about sexual politics. But war, oppressive authority, those are places our culture tends not to see. The horrific cloud over Isherwood’s and Fosse’s characters, the process of obliterating Germany into Nazism, all of that, was relegated the tiny descriptor, “Sad,” as the audience left. “Sad,” a word like a whimper to cover the subject.
Still, on a late summer night, sitting in the dark, watching this movie that has touched so many generations, in two centuries; sitting in the dark with all of those strangers in all their historical times, this is what movies are. They are stories we put up against the sky to watch over and over.
SOME ADDITIONAL SOURCES:
http://www.broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/cabaret.htm
…This website gives the production information for the original Broadway production in 1966 and revivals in 1987 and 1998.
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/7776/Cabaret/overview
…New York Times “overview” of the 1972 film’s career
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16810.The_Berlin_Stories
…this website is a good place to make a new reading list to include Christopher Isherwood, whose Berlin Stories about Berlin in the poignant end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Nazi Germany. Isherwood’s stories are the basis of the various forms of “Cabaret.” It was published in 1945 and written from his experience in Berlin in 1931.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/258724-i-am-a-camera-with-its-shutter-open-quite-passive
…another Goodreads link to Isherwood’s “I am a camera…” quote, worth reviewing here while thinking about the relation of some literature to history and historical memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Camera
…here’s the Wikipedia reminder of the adaptive sequence, Isherwood stories, to John van Druten’s 1951 and so immediate post-war, Broadway adaptation of the Isherwood Berlin stories. Van Druten’s play would then be adapted to musical drama format in in 1966.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/allies-end-occupation-of-west-germany
…Ten years of Allied occupation of West Germany ends 1955 from which point West Germany is a sovereign state. This link gives a brief summary
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/places/berlin_wall
….link to BBC discussion of Berlin Wall that divided East from West Berlin, built in 1961. The musical “Cabaret” premiered on Broadway five years later.
http://www.civilrights.org/archives/2009/06/449-stonewall.html
…a good account of the Stonewall riots in New York City, 1969, considered by many to be as good a “start” date for LGBT civil rights movement in the U.S.
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