Word: cabareting
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...would you believe Joe Masteroff, John Kandor, and Fred Ebb? These three are responsible for the book, music, and lyrics to Cabaret, in which Miss Lenya struggles through turgid material of a sort usually left to the likes of Molly Picon...
Based on John Van Druten's play, I Am A Camera (based in turn on a series of stories by Christopher Isherwood), Cabaret is set in the Berlin of 1930, where a naive young American novelist meets up and shacks up with a degenerate English cabaret girl. Then their landlady gets engaged to a Jewish widower living in another apartment in the same building...
...that's the first act--90 minutes of tedious exposition, interrupted at nitervals by flashy cabaret numbers signifying nothing, plus two musical attempts to represent the unrest which will shortly usher in Nazism. Some of the scenes and some of the songs are briefly engaging, particularly the "Pineapple" number sung by Miss Lenya and Jack Gilford, and Jill Haworth's opening carabet song. But nothing jells. The book seems to have been written as padding for an inspired score, and the score as the same for an exceptional book...
...triple bill loosely lifted from the writings of Mark Twain, Frank Stockton and Cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The unifying forces are the theme "man, woman and the devil," and score and lyrics by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, who did Fiddler on the Roof. A final derivative musical is Cabaret, which in earlier incarnations was Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories and the John van Druten drama I Am a Camera. With Jill Haworth in the old Julie Harris role, it is already one of the season's hottest tickets, not to mention the highest: $12 orchestra...
...blob of irritable radioactive ooze, for a moment later it knocks at the door and announces, with a hammer-and-sickly grin: "We're Norwheeguns." Actually the nervous Norsemen are petrified Soviet sailors whose sub has run aground on a sand bar. Their spokesman is Alan Arkin, a cabaret satirist (Second City) and Broadway clown (Luv), making a major movie debut that probably deserves an Oscar, a Lenin Peace Prize, and any other encouragements a wicked old world can offer...