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"Cabaret", America's Weimar, and Mythologies of the Gay SubjectAuthor(s): Mitchell MorrisSource: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 145-157Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3592973Accessed: 22-09-2015 17:54 UTC

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MITCHELL MORRIS

C a b a r e t Am er ica s W e i m a r n d

ythologies th a y S u b j e c t

Even well into its previews, the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret wasthought likely to fail. With its seedy characters in louche entangle-ments, luridly placed against the scene of a declining Weimar Repub-lic and a rising Nazi party, the show seemed to violate many of themost central conventions of the musical during its post-World WarII heyday. Although Christopher Isherwood's elaborately ironic talesof Weimar Berlin had been successfully adapted as a play and thenas a film,1 these were genres accustomed to morally troubling worldsin which conflict might not be resolved within the frame of the nar-rative (or ever); even in the mid-1960s there was little in discussionsof the Broadway musical to indicate that the genre might be able toaccommodate tragedies, films noirs, or similar dark spectacles.2 Nev-ertheless, as the legend of the musical would have it, Cabaret wasimmediately received as a stunningly original triumph, winning notonly such important awards as the Tony and New York Drama Crit-ics' Awards for Best Musical of 1966, but also the accolades of a pub-lic otherwise increasingly less interested in musicals.

The record of awards and box-office receipts do offer an unmistak-able record of the musical's success, but the critical reception of Cab-aret was less universally laudatory than usual accounts of the showwould indicate, and the mixed feelings that greeted the show pointup some interesting aspects of the show that continue to resonate inthe 1972 film. The foundation of critics' ambivalence was the show's

Mitchell Morris teaches in the Department of Musicology at UCLA. His schol-arly specialties include American popular music, opera, and the study ofmusic, gender, and sexuality. Among his recent works is a forthcoming book,The Persistence of Sentiment: Essays on Display and Feeling n '70s Pop Music(Berkeley: University of California Press).American Music Spring 2004? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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violation of the conventions in "Golden Age" musicals-there was nopossibility of any sort of happy ending, and the show was structuredin such a way that a significant portion of its music was overtly in-sincere, performed by ostentatiously cheap cynics on stage at the KitKat Klub. Among the disapprobators, the most interestingly detailedopinion came from an anonymous critic for Time magazine, who sawCabaret as "itself a form of decadence, a victory of surface over sub-stance," and declared that "[t]he least credible presumption of Caba-ret is that the dance floor of the Kit Kat Klub portrays a civilizationgoose-stepping its way to disaster. If the Kit Kat Klubs fostered Hit-ler, whatever will the Bunnies spawn?"3 On the other side of the re-ception were critics who liked it for its artifices, which after all com-pounded selected conventions of the Golden Age musical with moreaggressive ones seemingly derived from the politicized theatrics ofthe Weimar stage. In fact, the names of Brecht and Weill, along withGeorge Grosz and Marlene Dietrich, repeatedly appeared in print asways of implicitly justifying Cabaret's distance from the standardmodel of the musical.4

The question of historical realism was most fundamentally at stakein the divergent critical reactions to the Broadway show. From thepoint of view of Time's critic, the historical analysis that framed theshow was a simplistic jeremiad about sexual license and fascism. Re-viewer fans of Cabaret, pointing to the aesthetics of the Weimar Re-public and the stimmung of the musical, also had an overpoweringally in the presence of Lotte Lenya. Though Lenya's involvement fa-mously complicated the process of adaptation-to provide her withthe stage time she legendarily expected, an extensive amount of bookand music time was devoted to the secondary romance betweenFraulein Schneider and Herr Schmidt5-her position as Weill's wid-ow and famous survivor of the Weimar Republic lent an irresistiblepower to her endorsement of the show. Speaking to the press, shepraised the show (in the terms of a press agent's dream) for its real-ism: "For me ... it's just as if I left the Kit Kat Klub in Berlin last night.It's so authentic, it's frightening."6

Given Cabaret's enormous success on stage, it was certain that evenin the later '60s and early '70s, when both Broadway and Hollywoodwere suffering declining audiences and intractable structural insta-bilities within their respective industries, rights to the musical wouldbe purchased with an eye to making a film version.7 Cinerama madearrangements to buy the show's rights at the cost of $2.1 million, butits deal collapsed. When Emmanuel L. Wolf of Allied Artists bid forCabaret, the price was the considerably lower $1.5 million. Wolf ar-ranged to make the film with the involvement of Martin Baum at ABCfilms; Baum was instrumental in persuading Cy Feuer to produce.9

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Mythologies of the Gay Subject

Gene Kelly, the first choice for director, withdrew because of his wife'sillness,10 so the producers turned to choreographer-director Bob Fosse,then badly in need of a success to revive his flagging career. Fossewas determined from the beginning of his involvement to create awork noticeably different from the stage show.

Screenwriter Jay Presson Allen was told that the production wouldreturn to Isherwood's novels.1 In practical terms, this meant return-ing more to Van Druten's adaptations. The Schneider/Schultz sub-plot, though it carried a significant number of songs and explicitreflection about economics and politics at the end of the Weimar Re-public, was deleted in favor of the story taken from I Am a Camerainvolving Fritz Wendel, a fortune-hunting secret Jew who eventuallyreclaims his identity in the face of Nazi persecutions because of hislove for the openly Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer.12 Just as impor-tant was a substantial alteration in the show's male protagonist. "Clif-ford Bradshaw" in the Broadway show was identified as an Ameri-can writer of unimpeachably masculine (i.e., straight) credentials whofalls in love with the English actress Sally Bowles. The film's hero,renamed "Brian Roberts," was considerably more ambiguous. Allenunderstood that moving back towards Isherwood's novels meantchanging the sexual orientation of the male lead. Both Isherwood'sand Van Druten's works discreetly indicate the narrator's homosex-uality; the film of Cabaret split the difference of orientation betweenthe earlier works and the musical, making Brian Roberts at least sit-uationally bisexual.

Adjustments in the plot necessitated revisions in the music. For thesake of "realism," Fosse insisted on avoiding the artifices of noume-nal song in his film. As he asserted in a subsequent interview:

Today I get very antsy watching musicals in which people aresinging as they walk down the street or hand out laundry. In fact,

I think it looks a little silly. You can do it on stage. The theatrehas its own personality-it conveys a removed reality. The mov-ies bring that reality closer.13

Fosse therefore decided that all music in the film would be diegetic,though in a complex way. All of Cabaret's music has visible sources,either in the onstage band at the Kit Kat Klub, on the victrola, or inthe striking exception to the film's normative procedures, in the on-stage band at the Nazi quasi-rally in the Biergarten; the film is plot-ted and cut, however, so that the songs constantly inflect our inter-pretations of the off-stage action. The combination of musical structureand plot revision furthermore meant that the characters who singwould be restricted to the cabaret performers, bodiless phono-voices,and the Nazis: such important characters as Brian, Fritz, Max, Nata-

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lia, none of them sing a note.14 Since the razing of the Broadway scorenecessitated additional music in keeping with Fosse's conception,Kander and Ebb were placed on call to write tunes as required by thedevelopment of the film's plot.15

With respect to casting, Fosse only reluctantly accepted the produc-ers' insistence on bringing Joel Grey from the Broadway cast to con-tinue his role as the Emcee.16 All other characters, having been re-thought, were also recast. And Fosse himself naturally took chargeof the choreography, slanting his distinctive synthesis of jazz andvaudeville dance styles toward the camera's love of detail: broad styl-ized gestures remained within individual dance numbers to the de-gree that they seemed to evoke "freneticism," "expressionism," andother qualities that would mark the cinematic representation of Wei-mar bodily stage decorum, and yet small features of finger motionor eyebrow position were made to carry the momentous poetic weightthat would be invisible on a Broadway stage.17 This, too, was a kindof realism, though focused on representational efficacy rather than oneor another kind of verisimilitude.

Allen took the changes she was to make in the book of the musicalas a response to contemporary cultural politics in the United States atthe end of the "long 1960s."18 And it was so. The film version of Caba-ret sought as direct an address as possible to an era enraptured by thepossibilities of claiming ethnic identities as a matter of style, and sud-denly pondering the intricate subject positions within an emergent gayrights movement.19 But audience members preoccupied with "new"social problems and more than inclined to live and let live were notthe only ones the film sought to capture; there was also the tradition-al audience for the Golden Age musical, permanently transfixed byboys meeting girls, more apt to censure than pity the demimonde andits scandalous ways. How could sexual dissidence appear in such away that it could seem at once endorsed and condemned? And whatwere the historical implications of overlaying the vexed saga of theWeimar Republic with pointed resonances of America during its late-'60s time of troubles? What, to recall the anonymous Time magazinecritic troubled by the Broadway musical, about those Bunnies? It'sworth taking a brief look at a couple of strategies by which the filmcould manage to balance the interests of its dispersed constituenciesbefore moving to a consideration of two instances that speak to Caba-ret's trouble with the mythologies of the gay subject.

One method of satisfying both of the show's audiences was to in-sist upon the authenticity of the film as a representation of the De-cline and Fall of the Weimar Republic. This was an old trick: an end-less number of films produced during the days of the Code inHollywood had used a thin layer of scientism and scholarship to cloak

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their appeals to good old-fashioned prurience, and occasionally somegenuine cultural troublemaking. A rhetoric of authenticity promisedthe same prophylactic potential for Cabaret. One portentous narrationfrom the 1972 documentary featurette on the film reported that

An international cast and crew have gathered at the authenticlocales to make a significant new movie about Germany in the1930s.... [Director Bob Fosse] succeeds in recreating an era, andcapturing on film the feverish, divine decadence and excitementof Germany in the 1930s: the atmosphere of the picture.20

Other emphases on realism in this short feature included Minnelli'sreminder that "there really was" a Sally Bowles, and the narrator'sgee-whiz comment that Grey actually took the trouble to learn a Ger-man accent Such obsessions about verisimilitude are in keeping withthe genesis of the film: when the creators of the film were assembled,Martin Baum took Feuer, Fosse, and Allen to Germany to scout loca-tions before any other work had been done. While in Germany, Fossespent large amounts of time scouting faces for extras, hoping for "re-alistic" versions of expressionist caricature to help compose the mise-en-scene.21

But what is this "feverish, divine decadence" all about, and how isit that we could be so certain that it was the quintessence of Germa-ny in the 1930s? Berlin was already being mythologized as the mod-ern Babylon, or l'empire dans la fin de la decadence, during the WeimarRepublic; it is those garish semi-truths, especially the ones connect-ed to sexual transgression, that are being preserved by authentisticclaims about the making of Cabaret. And the film is very careful toshow the sources from which it builds its myths of divine decadence:Minnelli's "Louise Brooks" pageboy and her exaggerated gestural lan-guage derive from Pabst's Die Biichse die Pandora (1928); the costum-ing and general ambiance of the Kit Kat Klub updates Der blaue En-gel (1930), central to Dietrich's career. Both sets of citations convergein the performance of "Mein Herr," Sally's first number, when shecontorts herself upon a chair, replacing Dietrich's trampy insouciencewith a more frenzied musico-gestural complex.22 But Minnelli's per-formance is actually much more ambiguously gendered than Brooks'sor Dietrich's, even to such details as the way in which the vulgar frillsof the Weimar costumes are replaced by a mannish outfit that makesMinnelli look a lot like her mother.

When the standard American myth of the Weimar Republic wascombined with concerns of early 1970s' America, then, the character-istics to be highlighted were predictable-exotic perversions and plainsluttishness, opium/tobacco/booze, and popular music (that is, sex,drugs, and rock 'n' roll) against the backdrop of the rising Nazi party.

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A delicious tale, to frighten us with the spectacle of authoritarian rulewhile assuring us that even so, it could never happen here. The Broad-way production had famously placed a large slanted mirror againstthe stage such that audience members could see themselves incorpo-rated as part of the audience in the Kit Kat Klub; the remnant of thisstaging effect in the film is the distorted mirror foil in which the Em-cee's face appears at the beginning of the film, and in which a Naziarmband lingers at the end of the film-an inevitably distancing ef-fect that insulates the filmgoers from the danger of the spectacle.

The other way for the film of Cabaret to please both ancients andmoderns came through its plot structure, which indulges in invidi-ous comparisons so that along the way it can indulge itself in imper-missible pleasures. Consider the pure nobility of the eventual mar-riage of Fritz and Natalia and its contrast to the messy entanglementof Sally, Brian, and the aristocratic libertine Maximilian von Heune.If, as Rick Altman has suggested, the classic musical works by estab-lishing binary oppositions to be resolved, then we can place the taleof Fritz and Natalia squarely in that classic tradition: "Christian"/Jew;poor / rich; streetwise / hochgebildet; even blond /brunette; and so on.23Altogether different is the complicated relationship between Sally andBrian-though it would be easy to create a set of oppositions betweenthem as well, the fatal complication of sexual orientation, as embod-ied in their triangular affair with Max, is too much for the narrative.The real heterosexuals, as it were, are made into the morally heroicfigures in the film version of Cabaret, while the sexual outlaws inevi-tably lose out.24 But importantly for 1972, at least the outlaws will berepresented, and in a striking manner, too, where words fall aside infavor of music, dance, and the speech of elusive gazes: in Max's coun-try house, all three of them dance together in a menage that growsmore intense the quieter it gets, and more erotically charged the moreeach character avoids the eyes of the desired others (see Figure 1).

This is one of the most striking moments in Cabaret's attempt to sortout some of the twentieth century's mythologies of the gay subject.There is much trouble over unorthodox sexuality in the film of Caba-ret, infinitely more so than in the Broadway musical, and the failureof Sally and Brian to establish a romance-because of his sexual na-ture, as is made very clear-is central to the rueful tone that is oneaspect of the film's pervasive irony. Homosexuality in its various man-ifestations, as the principal representative of nonnormative eroticism,is also always involved in this irony, presented here as an eroticizedidentity built around and preoccupied with questions of false sem-blance, of performance and acting, of refusals of reality. Heterosexualromance is a serious thing, as we see when Fritz finally reveals him-self as a Jew for Natalia's sake. By contrast, the queerly desiring char-

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Figure 1: Sally, Max, and Brian in a complicated moment.

acters in Cabaret participate in an endless play of masks and mirrors,and yet, paradoxically, their insubstantiality continually calls into ques-tion what is meant by any reality. Let's take up, by further example,two aspects of the film in which we see a pervasive concern over ap-pearance and reality connected to the question of gay identities.

First, the character of Sally Bowles as played by Liza Minnelli isn'tthe Sally Bowles of earlier versions of the story, because in playingSally, Minnelli is also playing Judy Garland. Two of the new songsfor the film help make this clear: in musical style and choreography,"Mein Herr" distantly recalls Dietrich and Brooks, but it also recalls"Get Happy" from Summer Stock; "Maybe This Time" summons upthe ghost of "The Man That Got Away" in terms of affective tone (thisincludes the film's lighting) and especially of Minnelli's vocal andgestural stylizations. Indeed, throughout the film, Minnelli's hyper-expressive performance, developed, according to her, in collaborationwith Fosse, creates a sense of her own mother's idiosyncrasies evenas it evokes silent film acting. As important is the quality of extremeneediness she repeatedly conveys, a neediness that was never partof Sally's earlier characterizations. We may easily understand her ex-aggerations as the facade of security that gives away the secret of thelonging it pretends to conceal. In unkind testimony to Minnelli's bril-

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liance at this ploy, one critic viciously criticized her performance forits vulnerability: "she rattles around gawkily and disjointedly, likesomeone who never got over being unfeminine and unattractive."25Leaving aside the nastiness of its misogyny, the observation never-theless points to an important set of nuances in many of Garland'sgreatest roles, here captured in her daughter's work.

Playing Judy in this way not only helped Minnelli win the Oscarfor Best Actress, it also marked her ascent to the status of gay diva.A crucial aspect of such a role has always been artifice: the most en-during gay divas have always tended toward intensely manneredmodes of self-presentation, duplicating the crucial faultlines betweenpublic and private that matter so much to their favored audiences.Such concerns are not exclusively gay, of course, but Eve KosofskySedgwick among others has shown how their centrality to questionsof sexual definition has shaped all of their uses in twentieth-centuryWestern culture.26 Artifice is a way of indicating that there is a secret;in the past century's prime cultural texts, if there is a secret, how couldit not be that secret? Minnelli's Sally, carrying the joyous burdens ofmannerism, can stand in for the desires of her gay audience-not onlyfrom their point of view, but also the point of view of the audiencemembers for whom the spectacle of homosexual desire becomes allthe more attractive because of the obliquity with which it is most of-ten displayed.

Second, nearly all of the Broadway show's musical numbers re-tained in the film were "on-stage" songs, explicitly located in theseedy environment of the Kit Kat Klub. This was true as well of thethree new songs provided by Kander and Ebb for the film. The sepa-ration of music from the noumenal flow of the film plot was clearlya response to the differing formal protocols of realism with respectto stage and screen, as discussed above. Furthermore, the reducednumber of songs is more congruent with the temporal flow of filmthan with that of stage. In the camera's eye, the original show wouldhave seemed clotted to the point of stagnation. And film's ability tocross-cut offered a simple way to make specific songs serve multiplepurposes.

Such changes also increased the importance of the unsettling Em-cee, who is in many ways the center of sexual trouble in the musical:he is identifiably queer in the most inclusive sense, with his makeupand apparel recalling the epicene nineteenth-century figure of theDandy, now grown further decayed in the hothouse of the criminalworld; he is vividly nasty in his disloyalty to everything except vice-avarice and lust in particular; nothing and no one receives his respect,except when he must bow to official power; his performance style isa wonder of brittle artifice, such that there is no character outside the

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mannerisms of his performance. He cannot be fixed, and this is thesource of his fascination as well as of his danger. Grey's Emcee owesa great deal to Expressionist theater, in fact, but his traits also meshuncomfortably with those commonly imputed to homosexuals in ColdWar America.

Consider the description of the Emcee as "decadent," which hasbeen repeated to the point of inanity in discussions of the film.27 Rich-ard Gilman has shown how vacuous the term decadent tends to be incommon parlance, a place-holder for a congeries of sexual divergencesthat are disreputable without being absolutely criminal; beyond point-ing to a slight tendency for the city of Berlin to advertise itself as amarketplace for sexual specialties-Paris had long since cornered themarket on straight commercial sex-"decadent" is an exceedinglypoor descriptor for anything in Weimar Berlin.28 "Decadent" in mostof the journalism around Cabaret makes homosexuality a synecdochefor the sexual underground represented in Western cultures from atleast Baudelaire to the late twentieth century. To call the musical "dec-adent" was in effect to call it "gay."

But "decadent" is a word with an alibi-its homosexual specifici-ties rest within the realm of connotation rather than denotation. Suchrhetorical slipperiness is to the point, matching the imagery of dis-simulation that has also traditionally accompanied representations ofgay subjectivity. The disorienting shifts of tone that are possible inthe Emcee's gay performances (almost a species of Camp) depend onthis, and allow him to play to both sides of his audience. Take thesong "If You Could See Her," for instance, in which the sentimentali-ty of a traditional romantic song is parodied by the visual elementsand the savage punch line that was predictable from the song's open-ing verse-"she wouldn't look Jewish at all." We must wonder wheth-er the parody exists in order to enable the impassioned speech onbehalf of tolerance in the song's middle sections, or whether it is theplea for tolerance itself that is being mocked. In the end, we are like-ly to read the Emcee as a Mephistophelean figure, a spirit of nega-tion, not least because the film constantly sets out to link him withthe aestheticized politics of the Nazis, which look as fake as the shod-dy trappings of the Kit Kat Klub.

One of the creepiest moments in the movie comes when Brian andMax, having a drink in a rural Biergarten, suddenly witness an out-break of Nazi atavism in the form of the gemiitlich pseudo-folk song"Tomorrow Belongs to Me." The song is deliberately, embarrassinglysimple-minded (phrases like "the blossom embraces the bee" perfect-ly match the oafish qualities of the arrangement), but it gains muchof its horrid quality from the heightened unreality of its performancesituation. The youth who begins the song is impossibly blond and pret-

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Morris

ty, in the chastely prurient mode taken from Nazi or Soviet propagan-da posters. The voice that we hear displays the markings of attractive-ness, but there is always something a little pushed about its produc-tion, and the line of the melody is constantly broken into single pitches,creating a "notey" aggressiveness. The voice is also obviouslydubbed-the youth's larynx never moves and his mouth is too delib-erately posed to be a credible sound source. His body is carefullyposed, and framed to look natural in the most artificial way. The songis a lie. And yet, the film cuts back and forth between the singing boyand the members of his audience, who begin to glow with an excitedanimosity as they join in with the song.29 The song is a lie that works.And works: the verses are laid out in such a way that we have no realexpectation that the song will ever end-its accretionary structure al-lows it to revolve endlessly, and it fades out in the film as Brian, Max,and Sally drive away from the Biergarten. At the very end of this scene,we are given the briefest of shots of the Emcee, leering (see Figure 2).Though this device is adapted from the stage show's Act I finale, inthe context of film its ambiguity feels more intimate and therefore moreurgently in need of answer. What is he doing here, and what does hisexpression convey? Knowingness? Schadenfreude? Approval? Con-tempt? At whom are these emotions aimed?

Figure 2: The Emcee's stare of complicity.

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It's hard to know what to say about such moments in Cabaret. Thereis a certain power gained by thus emphasizing the hyperaesthetici-zation of a spurious normality that needs the abnormal to make sense.But there is a substantial risk of blaming the eventual victims of theNazis for the rise of the Nazis. With homosexuality, in particular, thisstrategy has had a long and depressing history, both because of theparty's espousal by some influential homosexuals before the Rohmpurges, and because of the Nazi's intensive use of homosocial bond-ing to enforce esprit du corps among its rank and file.30 And yet theportrayal of the Nazis as secret homosexuals rapidly became a toolparticularly of leftist intellectuals who have been influential in cul-turally prestigious accounts of the Nazi era. Cabaret, as its zeal for gayvisibility brings it to the edge of scapegoating, is thus only a few stepsaway from Visconti's unfortunate film La Caduta degli dei (1969).31 ron-ically, Fosse's own defense of Cabaret as a "love story" by denyinghis interest in versimilitude ended up conflating Visconti's myth alongwith the ones that had arisen during the Weimar period: "I was nottrying to make a factual film.... I was not trying to do The Damned.I was not trying to do a documentary on that period."32 Thus did thetangle of mythic realisms and realistic myths bring all to confusion.

In the end, Cabaret may perhaps be forgiven for its difficulties inmaking sense of the mythologies of the gay subject: these mytholo-gies have been internally incoherent and elusive since their develop-ment in the late nineteenth century. For that matter, the same thingis true of our modern legends of the Weimar Republic. It may be thatsuch rich confusions were the price paid for any representation at all.Joel Grey has said that Bob Fosse set out to make "a brand-new state-ment" by his film adaptation, but its newness required the recircula-tion of older tales whose misrepresentations served as the aestheticground of the show's existence. If "nostalgia is the prime dramatur-gical mode of musical theater,"33 then its fictions of pastness cannotbe condemned out of hand; they serve crucial purposes of trying torepresent the present by misrepresenting history. There is somethingpoignant about Cabaret's fated entanglement with its own legends; asour own legends begin to shift we may see the show's points of frac-ture, but perhaps we may still keep in mind the troubles it sought tocomprehend.

NOTES

An earlier version of this essay was read at the conference "The Hollywood Musical/Music in Hollywood," held at the University of Colorado-Boulder in August 2001. Iowe a special debt of thanks to Ray Knapp for many discussions that have made their

way into this text.

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1. The British/American playwright John Van Druten's 1952 adaptation of Isher-wood's Berlin Stories was entitled I Am a Camera; with a few revisions, it was madeinto a film in 1955, directed by Henry Cornelius and starring Julie Harris, LaurenceHarvey, and Shelley Winters.

2. West SideStory, perhaps

one of thelargest exceptions

to theBroadway

rule of thelieto fine, may owe its freedom to break convention to the elevating effect of Bernstein'sinvolvement.

3. "Kit Kat Kutups," Time 88, no. 23 (Dec. 2, 1966): 844. The show undoubtedly acquired an additional resonance from its temporal prox-

imity to increasing public awareness of the Holocaust. Simply by way of example, it'sworth remembering that Eichmann's trial in Israel, covered by Hannah Arendt (at hermost magisterial) in the New Yorker, ccurred in 1961; Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerus-alem, appeared in 1963.

5. It can be argued that a secondary romance like that of Schneider and Schmidt isa generic requirement for the musical. See Gerald Mast, "Can't Help Singin"': The Amer-

ican Musical on Stage and Screen (Woodstock N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1987), 322. But if VanDruten's adaptations had been relied upon, that couple would almost certainly havebeen the Wendel/Landauer pair restored to some extent in the film version. See be-low.

6. Quoted in Richard Gilman, "I Am a Musical," Newsweek 68, no. 23 (Dec. 5, 1966):96.

7. For a useful account of this situation, see Rick Altman, "The Problem of GenreHistory," in The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987),90-128, esp. 119-21.

8. Michael B. Druxman, The Musical: From Broadway to Hollywood (South BrunswickN.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1980), 144.

9. "Cabaret: A Legend in the Making," documentary feature, Warner Home Video,1997.10. James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts, The Great Hollywood Musical Pictures

(Metuchen N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 84-87. One also wonders if Kelly's bitter ex-perience with the reception of Hello Dolly (1969), a critical and box-office failure, hadmade him wary of Cabaret.

11. "Cabaret: A Legend in the Making."12. Martin Gottfried, All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse (New York: Bantam

Books, 1990), 206.13. New York Magazine 7 (Dec. 16, 1974): 58.14. This is the ground of Ethan Mordden's insistence that the film version of Caba-

ret is not actually a musical at all. See Mordden, The Hollywood Musical (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1981), 221-22.

15. "Cabaret: A Legend in the Making."16. It was made clear that Fosse had to accept Grey or be replaced as director. "Cab-

aret: A Legend in the Making."17. Kenneth Vance Gargaro, "The Work of Bob Fosse and the Choreographer-Direc-

tors in the Translation of Musicals to the Screen," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pitts-burgh, 1979, 111.

18. Also see the discussion, which parallels mine on many points, in Linda Mize-jewski, Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 200-235.

19. The Broadway show Cabaret clearly responds to the complex dialectic betweenCold War homophobia and increasingly explicit homosexual thematics in the postwarAmerican arts in creating its milieu. Between the show's debut and the film's produc-tion, however, the crucial political events of the Stonewall Rebellion (1969) and ensu-ing protests by gay men and lesbians made the representation of homosexuality in the

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film an even more pressing matter. As a perfect condensation of the ambiguous place-ment of gay audiences at the beginning of the '70s, we may note that as part of thepublicity surrounding the film, Fosse gave a serious interview to the quasi-closetedculture magazine After Dark-a transparent bid for the gay audience.

20. "Behind the ScenesDocumentary,

Cabaret," 1972. Theexciting suggestion

of anexpose is conveyed during this voice-over by the all-caps rubric THE RECREATION OFAN ERA on the screen.

21. Ronna Elaine Sloan, "Bob Fosse: An Analytic-Critical Study," Ph.D. dissertation,New York University, 1983, 183.

22. See Mordden, Hollywood Musical, 80.23. Altman, American Film Musical, esp. 207-13.24. Given the positioning of the film in postwar America, also, this would not have

been a good moment to muddle the show's binaries by adding homosexual Jewishcharacters to the mix.

25. Quoted in Sloan, "Bob Fosse," 184.

26. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1990).27. For example, in Ronald Bergen, Glamorous Musicals: Fifty Years of Hollywood's Ul-

timate Fantasy (London: Octopus Books, 1984), 157.28. See Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (New York: Farrar,

Strauss and Giroux, 1979), esp. 170-73.29. Fosse's choice in this scene of ambivalent facial expressions that nevertheless al-

ways contain a significant measure of anger brilliantly implies a complex historicalnarrative about populist rage and the Nazi party.

30. The importance of homosocial energies in morale-building and consequent ani-mus toward homosexuals are commonplace among most masculinist enterprises; wit-

ness the struggle over the issue of gay military service in the United States to this day.It cannot be thought of as a specific feature of Nazi ideology beyond its characteristicway of valuing a particular construction of maleness.

31. Its translated titles are Gotterdammerung or The Damned, and in a famously spec-tacular whirlwind of lascivious self-loathing features a gay Nazi orgy, starring Hel-mut Berger in Marlene drag, interrupted by the Night of the Long Knives.

32. Quoted in Mizejewski, Divine Decadence, 201. As further evidence of how easy itis to inadvertently cast blame, consider a recent discussion of Cabaret hat, by misread-ing the film's ambivalent treatment of gay signifiers, scapegoats homosexuals for theNazi's exploitation of homosocial energies even while condemning Nazi homophobia.See Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Min-

nesota Press, 2001), 91-93.33. Rebecca Ann Rugg, "What It Used to Be: Nostalgia and the State of the Broad-

way Musical," Theater 32, no. 2 (2002): 44-55.

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