Word: druten
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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...
...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...
Bell, Book and Candle (Phoenix; Columbia). John Van Druten's comedy about the contemporary prevalence of witches cast enough of a spell on theatergoers to give it a six-month run on Broadway. But somewhere between Broadway and Hollywood the broomstick broke down. Like the play, the picture is about a beautiful witch (Kim Novak) who decides to exchange cantrip and gramarye for love and marriage, and about the man (James Stewart) she sets out to enchant. The part is almost perfectly written for Actress Novak. The script quickly announces that as a witch she is not supposed...
Some nights, everything just goes right. I Am a Camera is very funny, but it is more than a ramshackle frame on which gag lines are hung. Playwright John Van Druten found some real people in Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories, and around them he built a real play. He does not go very deeply into the question he raises of hedonism versus social involvement, but it is nice to have an issue to fill the brief spaces between laughs...
Much more, of course, was going on in Germany in 1930 than the private affairs of Sally and Chris. Van Druten varies his comedy by introducing several characters who are affected by the growing Nazi power, then a cloud no bigger than a man's fist. As an earnest, worried Jewish girl, Louise Bell is excellent, though no better than Roger Klein as her suitor. Lilian Aylward plays a warm, tolerant, ignorant old landlady who for all her kindliness is a virulent anti-Semite. She is immense in every sense of the word...