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Fred Ebb: "Cabaret"

 The song "Cabaret" is like "And I'm Telling You...." People sometimes miss the meaning.


"Cabaret" is not actually a triumphant invitation to "love life." It's the desperate half-protest of a bad actress, a bad singer, who is "giving up." Sally Bowles understands that the Nazis are about to take over Germany, but she is opting not to resist. "No use permitting some prophet of doom--to wipe every smile away!" This is how Sally is asking to be remembered; it's uncomfortable for everyone in the audience.

I think "Cabaret" has one of the great bridges in musical-theater history, and it's meant to be an instructive story:

I used to have a girlfriend known as Elsie....
With whom I shared four sordid rooms in Chelsea.
She wasn't what you'd call a blushing flower.
As a matter of fact, she rented by the hour!

The day she died, the neighbors came to snicker.
Well, that's what comes of too much pills-and-liquor.
But when I saw her laid out like a queen?
She was the happiest corpse I'd ever seen....

Here, Sally is trying to finesse the Amy Winehouse saga as something inspirational. "The happiest corpse"--? A young, dead person? The mind reels.

I'm a fan of the Kander/Ebb "less is more" strategy. There is humor and bite when Elsie treats herself like a motel room: "She rented by the hour!" And we get a topic sentence from far, far off in left field: "The day she died....the neighbors came to snicker...." Talk about burying the lede!

This is an unnerving masterpiece, an object of Sondheim's admiration -- and I hope we'll get "Cabaret" on Broadway very soon.
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