Word: cabareting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cabaret's treatment of decadence, however, signals only one major change in the Hollywood mentality. Where the movies once had to turn to towns like Sodom and Gomorrah for titillating and moralistic examples of vice unfettered, they now need go no further than the early days of the Third Reich. Movies as different as Stanley Kramer's Ship of Fools. Lucino Visconti's The Damned. Hal Prince's Something for Everyone and Bertolluci's The Conformist have begun to pick and prod the corpses of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in search of moral parallels to our own, none...
...last thing you might expect to find amid such hypercharged emotionalism is an affecting musical. And Cabaret, in dealing with the beginning of the Nazi end, takes a good many chances. Its hopes is that decadence can be at once entertaining and instructive, and that its historical milieu can provide a poignant contrast to the lives of its characters. The danger is that the decadence will shine forth as either bogus or overwhelming, and that the historical setting will overshadow the characters poised before it. Cabaret gambles on the trade and, I fear, it loses. But though it fails...
...CABARET WAS a watershed of a musical and it is even more of an achievement as a film. Produced by Hal Prince, directed by Joe Masteroff, with music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Cabaret appeared on Broadway in 1966 to deliver a telling blow to the old-fashioned Broadway musical where songs served merely as dialogue and the songs cue was king. Ever since Oklahoma' had hit the scene in the forties, musicals were presumed to be merely souped up dramas. Lyrics had to advance the plot and dances were expected to serve some dramatic function. Cabaret...
...readily agrees to pinch-hit as a chorus girl in drag as he assumes the role of death's subaltern on earth, doing both with a manic enthusiasm that belongs only to the dying and damned. With Grey's M.C. on hand, the conventional half of Cabaret was never even in the running...
...Cabaret was a musical with both intelligence and style and what more could a body want. Its importance was made all the clearer when it spawned such other Hal Prince efforts as Zorba, where the commentator's role was taken over by the musical's entire ensemble: Company, which the cane-stomping choreography of a number like Cabaret's "Wilkommen" reappears in "Side by Side" and "What Would We Do Without You?"; and Follies, in whose case Cabaret's final ghost-ridden moments give way to a whole production hung halfway between the present and the past...