CABARET MUSIC

Sally Bowles sang “Life Is a Cabaret” in the Broadway and film musical Cabaret. Like life, the cabaret scene (and its music) can be raw, immediate, bitter, sweet, sad, or romantic—but always an intimate experience. With a past that stretches from 19th-century Parisian cafés to seedy 1920s Berlin clubs to today’s sophisticated Manhattan nightspots, cabaret has always been a place where the evening’s entertainment breaks down the boundaries between performer and audience. Best exemplified by the satirical 1920s ballads of composer Kurt WEILL and lyricist-playwright Bertolt Brecht, it has evolved into the launching pad for such well-known performers as Barbra STREISAND and Bette Midler.

ARTISTIC FREEDOM

Cabaret was born with the 1881 opening of the Chat Noir in Paris. A place for artists to gather and experiment, the club was symbolised by a black cat which, according to writer Lisa Appignanesi, “could sing, recite, dance, show shadow plays, write music, lyrics, farce, and, above all, perform.” Filled with avant-garde artists and social outcasts, the Montmartre district was the perfect setting for a club that blended cynical and sometimes sentimental songs, anarchistic politics, and often violent behaviour. Ironically, the object of much of the satire, the Parisian bourgeoisie, began frequenting the club. By the turn of the century, cabarets had sprung up all over Europe. During World War I, the Cabaret Voltaire opened in Zurich as a place where artist refugees performed music and poetry.

After World War I, Berlin became the scene of cabaret’s full flowering. In small clubs throughout the city, entertainers poked often critical fun at topical issues like sex (mostly), society, and the rise of Hitler’s National Socialists. Marlene Dietrich’s Lola singing “Falling in Love Again” in the movie The Blue Angel embodies the image of the world-weary cabaret singer, while Brecht-Weill ballads like “Mack the Knife” and “Alabama Song” (as performed by Weill’s wife Lotte Lenya) gave the cabaret its soundtrack—although, in fact, their music was primarily performed in musical theatre. The Kit Kat Klub, the garish Berlin nightclub that was the setting of Cabaret, exemplifies the cabaret spirit before the repressive Nazi regime shut it down.

Cabaret took an idiosyncratic turn in the U.K. in the 1940s and 1950s with the revue style, derived from university cabarets, most famously at Cambridge, of such performers as Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. Their best-known show At the Drop of a Hat was characterised by genial political comment and inspired silliness, accompanied by the artful musical comments of Swann at the piano.

By the late 1940s, cabaret had crossed the Atlantic and found a home in Manhattan cafés. In such legendary nightspots as the Blue Angel, with its chic all-black decor, performers like Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer redefined cabaret music as sophisticated and stylish. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of talented entertainers like Streisand, Tammy Grimes, and Blossom Dearie were seen at other New York City clubs such as Bon Soir and Upstairs at the Downstairs. With the onset of rock music, cabaret seemed fated to become an endangered species. However, in recent years, talented song stylists Andrea Marcovicci, Susannah McCorkle, and Weslia Whitfield have given cabaret a new life. For as long as audiences want to listen to music performed in an intimate nightclub setting, they will, as Sally Bowles sang, “come to the cabaret.”

Michael R. Ross