Cabaret FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Broadway and Cinema Classic

by June Sawyers

The book features chapters on Jean Ross and Christopher Isherwood – the real people behind the singular characters of Sally Bowles and Clifford Bradshaw/Brian Roberts – and includes background information on the original source material, Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin stories and the first time Sally Bowles, as portrayed by Julie Harris, appeared onstage and on the big screen in John Van Druten's I Am a Camera . It also explores the stories behind the figure of the outlandish Emcee as well as the actors who played him, from Joel Grey to Alan Cumming. And it studies the famous musical score by John Kander and Fred Ebb and looks into the burlesque roots of director Bob Fosse in his native Chicago. Throughout the book, the author makes connections and associations to Cabaret by looking at such diverse topics as the first cabarets in Paris, Cabaret Voltaire and Dada, early Berlin cabarets during the Weimar Republic, German expressionism, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich and The Blue Angel , David Bowie's many German influences, and the present and future of modern cabaret. Cabaret FAQ is the definitive guide for all fans of the Broadway musical and movie as well as for fans of the art form known as cabaret.

342 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2017

Reviews

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely give books 1 star or 5 stars. This book about Kander & Ebb's classic stage and film musical deserves its low rating. It reads like an amateurish self-published book, in which case I might have been kinder to it, but it's put out by Applause Books, a professional company. The high points: there are some interesting facts unearthed here and there (for example, the inspiration for the Emcee character and some info about the real people behind Sally Bowles and her friends).

Pointing out all of the books's flaws would be like shooting fish in a barrel but here are some of the low points. 1) The first 70 pages covers in tedious and rarely relevant detail the history of the concept of the cabaret show--about 10 pages would be sufficient. 2) The final 40 pages is about David Bowie (because he recorded three albums in Berlin) and modern cabaret entertainment, all absolute padding to an already overstuffed book. 3) The constant repetition of facts drove me crazy (she defines 'concept musical' three times and never quite gets it right). 4) Many of her chapters, especially about people and ideas, seem like they came mostly from Wikipedia pages. To be fair, she does have a 10-page bibliography, but I often could not figure out what the source of some of her info was.

5) Many of the photos in the book are simply pictures of CDs and DVDs that the author owns. In a chapter on Alan Cumming (the Emcee in a couple of recent revivals), the only photos present are of him performing in a one-man show which had little, if anything, to do with Cabaret. 6) Because the author lives in Chicago, we get tedious coverage of two Chicago-area school productions of the play. All of this should have been excised. 7) The chapters read like mini-essays that were combined with no attempt made at revision for flow or clarity. For example, on page 109, she says that it's not clear who came up with the idea to adapt Isherwood's stories for a musical, but just three pages earlier, she told us that it was Isherwood's idea and that he had worked with W.H. Auden a few years before the Kander & Ebb version. She "introduces" Jean Ross as the real person behind Sally Bowles three times.

This is one of the few books I've ever bought that I wanted to return for cash because it was so bad. And it's all the more frustrating because the topic is such a good one. I hope someone else comes along some day to do a better job.

[Jake Van Hoorn · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some very interesting pieces of information in here but structurally it is a mess.