Word: klub
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JOEL GREY'S DIABOLICAL LEER, Liza Minelli's divinely decadent green nail polish and nervous mannerisms and the way her magnificent, ringing voice transfigured both in the lurid glare of the Kit Kat Klub--these are images that linger long and powerfully from the film version of Cabaret. From the growing horror of Nazism in Weimar Germany, the film cut artfully to the dazzling, perverse world of the cabaret, which grotesquely parodied an even more grotesque reality. The effect was to present a society in which decent human relationships were impossible, where human contacts were uniformly debased to the level...
...shadow of the movie, even though play and film are structurally distinct. The subplots are completely different, the main plot varies in significant details, and, most important, the film version transplanted virtually all the music to the cabaret sequences, heightening the contrast between the escapism of the Kit Kat Klub and the painful drama outside. If the play suffers from the blurring of these two worlds, however, it benefits from the mere fact that it is theater--that we, the audience, are immediately present as the audience of the Kit Kat Klub and as participants in the decadence it purveys...
...thoughts to each other whenever that plot hit a crucial junction--it also introduced seemingly non-integrated throwaway numbers that commented on the plot rather than advance it. It all looked innocent enough--since Sally Bowles, the play's heroine, sings in a sleazy Berlin nightclub, the Kit Kat Klub, it was only natural that the musical would utilize some of the numbers she would have sung on the job. The effect, however, proved far more insidious...
...Klub--underneath its rouged and mascaraed exterior--possesses a knowing intelligence in the character of its Master of Ceremonies--as played by Joel Grey, a wicked little man who as 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, voted the Tony and Drama Critics' Circle awards as Best Musical, mounts a mountain of a production on a molehill of a book. Joel Grey is pluperfect as the degenerate M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in the degenerating Berlin of the 1930s...