DON'T MISS THIS ONE!
Tue, 6 June 2000, 05:09 pmWalter Plinge2 posts in thread
DON'T MISS THIS ONE!
Tue, 6 June 2000, 05:09 pmJust to remind everyone who hasn't been checking "What's On" that Playlovers production of CABARET opens on June 23rd.
Come and see it, even if you have already seen a production of this show, because it will be unlike any other. Director David Gardette has melded together elements of the original production with the recent Broadway revival but has also injected the show with exciting new ideas. The amazing cast includes Helen McFarlane, Greg Jones, Jarrad West, David Young, Kerry Goode, Tracey Woolrych and Kevin Owen.
BOOKINGS ARE NOW OPEN! (Phone 0415 777 173).
Come and see it, even if you have already seen a production of this show, because it will be unlike any other. Director David Gardette has melded together elements of the original production with the recent Broadway revival but has also injected the show with exciting new ideas. The amazing cast includes Helen McFarlane, Greg Jones, Jarrad West, David Young, Kerry Goode, Tracey Woolrych and Kevin Owen.
BOOKINGS ARE NOW OPEN! (Phone 0415 777 173).
Some facts that helped create the fiction!
Wed, 14 June 2000, 07:21 pmWalter Plinge
Excerpts from WILLKOMMEN
From Stagebill Theatre In Depth
By Laurence Senelick
Most people came to the cabaret for entertainment and escape. The 1920s were a period of considerable political and economic instability. For cabaret-goers, plunging into a throng of like-minded pleasure-seekers in the frantic attempt to elude the inescapable, insoluble problems of everyday life was a way of achieving wholeness in a fragmented society. The darker the political situation, the lighter the entertainment.
By 1922 there were about 200 cabarets in Germany, most of them serving their customers with slapstick comedy, naked flesh, or contortionists rather than a critique of the times. The spectrum of diversion ran from ostrich races to erotic singles clubs where every table was furnished with a telephone for ringing up the not-too-obscure object of desire. There were huge amusement palaces like the Wintergarten where thousands of spectators could gobble frankfurters as they watched spangled acrobats swing on trapezes. At the other pole were shady honky-tonks where a few select clients could choose from a smorgasbord of sex acts for their viewing pleasure.
When audience expectations were challenged, trouble often erupted. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Katakombe ("Catacombs"), a socially satiric young people's cabaret, suddenly discovered it had a political conscience. Its emcee, Werner Finck, began to tweak the authorities by such gags as giving the Nazi salute and then saying, "That's how far we are in the @!#$." National Socialist sympathizers in the audience got indignant at this new-found boldness. "You dirty Jew!" one of them shouted. "I'm not Jewish," Finck responded to the heckler. "Can I help it if I look that intelligent?"
Like many of his colleagues, Finck ended up in a concentration camp, and Propaganda Minister Goebbels essentially banned cabaret in 1941 as harmful to the war effort. No sooner had the Allies occupied Berlin, when a small cabaret opened amid the rubble. "Coming to the cabaret" was to become a token of liberation. Whatever it's complicated reality, Weimar cabaret persists in the popular imagination as a byword for outrageous provocation and decadence.
(Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University and the author of Cabaret Performance: Europe 1890-1940. He recently delivered a series of lectures for the Goethe Institute in Rome on Weimar cabaret).
From Stagebill Theatre In Depth
By Laurence Senelick
Most people came to the cabaret for entertainment and escape. The 1920s were a period of considerable political and economic instability. For cabaret-goers, plunging into a throng of like-minded pleasure-seekers in the frantic attempt to elude the inescapable, insoluble problems of everyday life was a way of achieving wholeness in a fragmented society. The darker the political situation, the lighter the entertainment.
By 1922 there were about 200 cabarets in Germany, most of them serving their customers with slapstick comedy, naked flesh, or contortionists rather than a critique of the times. The spectrum of diversion ran from ostrich races to erotic singles clubs where every table was furnished with a telephone for ringing up the not-too-obscure object of desire. There were huge amusement palaces like the Wintergarten where thousands of spectators could gobble frankfurters as they watched spangled acrobats swing on trapezes. At the other pole were shady honky-tonks where a few select clients could choose from a smorgasbord of sex acts for their viewing pleasure.
When audience expectations were challenged, trouble often erupted. After Hitler came to power in 1933, the Katakombe ("Catacombs"), a socially satiric young people's cabaret, suddenly discovered it had a political conscience. Its emcee, Werner Finck, began to tweak the authorities by such gags as giving the Nazi salute and then saying, "That's how far we are in the @!#$." National Socialist sympathizers in the audience got indignant at this new-found boldness. "You dirty Jew!" one of them shouted. "I'm not Jewish," Finck responded to the heckler. "Can I help it if I look that intelligent?"
Like many of his colleagues, Finck ended up in a concentration camp, and Propaganda Minister Goebbels essentially banned cabaret in 1941 as harmful to the war effort. No sooner had the Allies occupied Berlin, when a small cabaret opened amid the rubble. "Coming to the cabaret" was to become a token of liberation. Whatever it's complicated reality, Weimar cabaret persists in the popular imagination as a byword for outrageous provocation and decadence.
(Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor of Drama at Tufts University and the author of Cabaret Performance: Europe 1890-1940. He recently delivered a series of lectures for the Goethe Institute in Rome on Weimar cabaret).