Word: cabareting
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Whoosh. Becaud studied piano and composition, and was making a meager living writing cabaret songs when a friend suggested in 1953 that he ought to sing them as well. "When I told my wife I was going to sing," he recalls, "she said, 'You're not going to do that!' 'Yes, I am,' I said. We laughed for three hours...
...delivered onstage with maniacal precision, their reflections on the state of the world have fetched Hendra and Ullett all the way to the colonies, to three guest shots so far on Ed Sullivan's TV show, and currently to an imposing seven-month run at the Manhattan cabaret PLaza...
...second act is better. Something happens in it. The landlady (Miss Lenya) decides not to marry her Jewish tenant (Mr. Gilford) because of the climate of anti-Semitism. The cabaret girl (Miss Haworth) refuses to leave Germany with the American writer (Bart Convy) and, thinking their relationship at an end, gets an abortion. There follows a melodramatic confession scene in which Miss Haworth broadly hints at what she has done, but scrupulously avoids the word for it. Mr. Convy zips off to Paris, Miss Haworth goes back to work, and Hitler comes to power, with all that that entails...
Only in the rare instances when something works do we get an idea of what Cabaret was meant to be. Joel Gray, as the master of ceremonies, does a brilliant love song with a female gorilla, titled "If You Could See Her Through My Eyes." The obvious parallel to Miss Lenya's relationship with Mr. Gilford gives the song a relevance all the other cabaret numbers lack. A song of popular unrest, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," is later twisted into a grotesque Nazi rallying cry, and the meaning is again clear...
...Cabaret's ambitions are loftier than those of most musicals: it attempts to sketch an era by playing a personal drama against a political one. But the attempt gets lost in a mire of timeless musical cliches, and we are left with a peculiarly ungripping love story...