Cabaret, America's Weimar, and Mythologies of the Gay Subject

By Mitchell Morris

Even well into its previews, the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret was thought likely to fail. With its seedy characters in louche entanglements, luridly placed against the scene of a declining Weimar Republic and a rising Nazi party, the show seemed to violate many of the most central conventions of the musical during its post-World War II heyday. Although Christopher Isherwood's elaborately ironic tales of Weimar Berlin had been successfully adapted as a play and then as a film, these were genres accustomed to morally troubling worlds in which conflict might not be resolved within the frame of the narrative (or ever); even in the mid-1960s there was little in discussions of the Broadway musical to indicate that the genre might be able to accommodate tragedies, films noirs, or similar dark spectacles. Nevertheless, as the legend of the musical would have it, Cabaret was immediately received as a stunningly original triumph, winning not only such important awards as the Tony and New York Drama Critics' Awards for Best Musical of 1966, but also the accolades of a public otherwise increasingly less interested in musicals.