Today, we know John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Joe Masteroff's Cabaret as one of Broadway's most revived musicals—the current production, running at the August Wilson Theatre, is the musical's fifth Broadway outing. It's almost hard to believe that when the Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall-directed revival opened today in 1998, it was only the second ever Cabaret staging to play the Main Stem.
A nerdy caveat: it was the second revival since the musical premiered in 1966. But the first was a re-mount of the original production with some slight book changes and a couple new songs. More on that here.
It was this new staging, a slightly expanded version of a 1996 London revival at the Donmar Warehouse (where Mendes was then artistic director), that really transformed the way we perform Cabaret today. The musical was certainly groundbreaking when it premiered in 1966, transporting audiences to a seedy Berlin nightclub to explore the final days of Weimar-era Germany, and the complacence and delusion that allowed the Nazis and their fascism to invade. Harold Prince won his first Tony Award as a director for helming the original production, which put the soon-to-be legendary Phantom of the Opera and Sweeney Todd director on the map as a daring and artistic provocateur. Musicals had long been concerning themselves with darker narratives, but Cabaret was something altogether different. And, mostly thanks to Kander and Ebb's score, it did so with a surprisingly entertaining (and bitingly ironic) score—"Wilkommen," "Don't Tell Mama," "Cabaret," and others songs have all become favorites.
But by modern standards—and even the standards of Cabaret's source material, Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories—the original Cabaret was fairly tame. If you know the show today, you might be surprised to learn that Cliff, based on Isherwood, is straight. And Joel Grey's Emcee was always fully clothed in a tuxedo.
And then the musical made the jump to the big screen in 1972, with Broadway director-choreographer Bob Fosse taking the lead. Fosse brought his own seedy sensibilities to the property and made the work darker and sexier than its stage counterpart. The film revolutionized the genre, becoming a critical and audience hit that is still noted today for changing the face of what movie musicals could look like.
By the time Cabaret was ready to get a major new staging in the '90s, the musical was so closely associated with the film version that Mendes sought to make a new stage version that also incorporated the cinematic elements. That '80s re-mount of the original production had added some vague references to Cliff perhaps being bisexual, but Mendes had Masteroff revise the book to be even closer to its source material, making the character expressly queer. When the revival came to Broadway, Marshall was brought on as choreographer and co-director to give some Fosse-esque style to the affair also. Alan Cumming as the Emcee ditched the tuxedo for trousers and suspenders over his bare chest, complete with rouged nipples. In another scene, he wore a dress. This Cabaret dared to explore the full breadth of gender and sexual expression that was really happening in Weimar Germany before World War II.
And once again, this Cabaret was a big hit—much bigger than the original staging, actually. The production came to Broadway initially as a limited run via Roundabout Theatre at their Henry Miller's Theatre, re-christened the Kit Kat Club for its run (the venue is now the Sondheim, home to & Juliet). Ticket sales were so good that the show was moved to the then-newly refurbished Studio 54 for an open-ended commercial run, which continued for almost six years—2,377 performances and 37 previews. It also won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical.
As with the long-running revival of Kander and Ebb's Chicago, this Cabaret kept audiences coming back with a long list of starry replacements. The original company featured Cumming as the Emcee and Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles, both of whom won Tony Awards for their work. Over the course of the run, Cumming was succeeded by such stars as Adam Pascal, Neil Patrick Harris, John Stamos, Raúl Esparza, and Michael C. Hall; and Richardson was followed by Debbie Gibson, Jane Leeves, Molly Ringwald, Brooke Shields, Kate Shindle, Gina Gershon, Katie Finneran, Lea Thompson, Joely Fisher, Susan Egan, Mary McCormack, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The production was so successful, in fact, that Roundabout brought it back in 2014, with Cumming reprising his performance opposite Michelle Williams and, later, Emma Stone.
But the production's biggest impact is the version of the show it created. Theatre companies looking to produce Cabaret can still opt to do the 1966 original version (and that '80s revision, for that matter). But most choose the 1998 edition, which is also the basis of the current Rebecca Frecknell-directed Broadway revival. Cabaret has always been a theatre favorite, but it took three decades to reach its current and now most beloved form.
Look back at the many casts of the 1998 revival of Cabaret in the gallery below:
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