Cabaret opened on Broadway nearly 60 years ago, it was revolutionary in portraying Weimer-era Germany, sexual liberation, and the rise of fascism. Cut to today and the current revival, which initially starred Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee (reprising the role from The West End), now featuring Adam Lambert, and soon to showcase queer country favorite Orville Peck.
But Cabaret‘s queer roots run much deeper than this most recent production, which transformed the August Wilson Theatre into an immersive Kit Kat Club with pre-show entertainment and cocktails to contrast the turn of events that follow. Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.The gay songwriting team of John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics), along with playwright Joe Masteroff and producer-director Hal Prince, turned to John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera as source material, which, in turn, was based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1939novel Goodbye to Berlin.
And while it’s been well-documented that Berlin was a hub of LGBTQ+ creativity and expression in the 1920s and ’30s, Cabaret took time to find its queer footing. Most eyes have been on the queering of the Emcee since Alan Cumming’s Tony-winning turn in Sam Mendes’ 1998 production, which ended with the character removing his outer garments to reveal a prison uniform emblazoned with an inverted pink triangle, identifying him as homosexual.However, the character of Clifford, who acts as a conduit for the audience in the highly conceptualized work, has also evolved, despite Van Druten and Isherwood both identifying as gay.
“Little by little Cliff became gay as the years passed on and finally, in the Roundabout production, he actually kissed a guy on stage.”“When we first did it, there was no way the leading man in the show could be gay. He was never gay in the Isherwood stories or I am a Camera, and when we did it in 1966 he wasn’t gay either,” said book writer Masteroff in
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