Cabaret Broadway Quotes

The city seemed untroubled by the war. Broadway—“the Great White Way,” so dubbed for its bright electric lighting—came brilliantly alight and alive each night, as always, although now with unexpected competition. A number of restaurants had begun providing lavish entertainment along with meals, even though they lacked theater licenses. The city was threatening a crackdown on these maverick “cabarets.

The film version of Chicago is a milestone in the still-being-written history of film musicals. It resurrected the genre, winning the Oscar for Best Picture, but its long-term impact remains unclear. Rob Marshall, who achieved such success as the co-director of the 1998 stage revival of Cabaret, began his career as a choreographer, and hence was well suited to direct as well as choreograph the dance-focused Chicago film. The screen version is indeed filled with dancing (in a style reminiscent of original choreographer Bob Fosse, with plenty of modern touches) and retains much of the music and the book of the stage version. But Marshall made several bold moves. First, he cast three movie stars – Catherine Zeta-Jones (former vaudeville star turned murderess Velma Kelly), Renée Zellweger (fame-hungry Roxie Hart), and Richard Gere (celebrity lawyer Billy Flynn) – rather than Broadway veterans. Of these, only Zeta-Jones had training as a singer and dancer. Zellweger’s character did not need to be an expert singer or dancer, she simply needed to want to be, and Zellweger’s own Hollywood persona of vulnerability and stardom blended in many critics’ minds with that of Roxie.8 Since the show is about celebrity, casting three Hollywood icons seemed appropriate, even if the show’s cynical tone and violent plotlines do not shed the best light on how stars achieve fame. Marshall’s boldest move, though, was in his conception of the film itself. Virtually every song in the film – with the exception of Amos’s ‘Mr Cellophane’ and a few on-stage numbers like Velma’s ‘All That Jazz’ – takes place inside Roxie’s mind. The heroine escapes from her grim reality by envisioning entire production numbers in her head. Some film critics and theatre scholars found this to be a cheap trick, a cop-out by a director afraid to let his characters burst into song during the course of their normal lives, but other critics – and movie-goers – embraced this technique as one that made the musical palatable for modern audiences not accustomed to musicals. Marshall also chose a rapid-cut editing style, filled with close-ups that never allow the viewer to see a group of dancers from a distance, nor often even an entire dancer’s body. Arms curve, legs extend, but only a few numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘Cell Block Tango’ are treated like fully staged group numbers that one can take in as a whole.

Of course you have noticed what has been happening to the night life of New York during the last few months? I mean the introduction of a new social element, the small club, which has taken the place of the elaborate cabarets of last year [most of whose illicit liquor cellars had been shut down]. When the regular patrons of these joyous locations sought them ... they found, pendant from the entrance door, a great padlock supplemented by a stern placard which announced that the place had been closed for violating the Eighteenth Amendment. [In this way,] the small, private clubs came into existence. They are the thing. Everyone who isn’t tucked in his crib right after his nine o’clock bottle now belongs to one or two of these clubs. I am the proud possessor of membership cards in six. The club rooms do not seek the spotlight of Broadway but glow discreetly in the adjacent side streets. Entrance to them is a matter of punctilious procedure. The door is rigidly barred against the individual who cannot show his membership card. Merely to be dressed and pleasantly intoxicated will not suffice. The Bee Hive for instance is a very swanky and exclusive establishment." Not long ago, at the Bee Hive, just after the row short cabaret performance by Miss Klark's Kiddies, one of the young ladies at the table next to mine—a stranger, of course—spent the entire balance of the evening in my lap. She simply wouldn't take no for an answer. Her basic idea was to make me feel as if I were among friends. She broke quite a number of things on the table and occasioned a real outburst of laughter when she stuck a fork into the leg of a total stranger whom she mistook for a friend. Such a madcap I have never seen! And so it went all evening. The closing hour was a little confused because someone, who obviously could not have been a member, shot one of the guests in the thigh, but it proved to be only a flesh wound and the incident was laughed off with great good nature by all. But I could not help asking myself where, in the old days, could one have had such a joyous, care-free time without interference? We have our reformers and legislators to thank. The bluer the laws, the redder the lights." Doctor T. Thorndyke Westerly, “Broadway's Charming Little Supper Clubs,” December 1924