Songbook #13: Cabaret
What good is sitting alone in your room?
Come hear the music play.
Written by John Kander & Fred Ebb, performed by many, most famously Liza Minnelli.
Cabaret
So in my post about It Had to Be You I mentioned that my sister got me to do ballroom dancing the first semester of my first senior year in college, which was her first semester of her freshman year (Fall 1999, for those keeping score at home). The other thing she convinced me to be involved with was Footlighters, which was CWRU's at that time still nascent musical theater group. That semester's performance of Cabaret was just their fourth production ever.
Now, tigerlily_blue did a lot of musical theater in high school and was usually the female lead, so I wasn't at all surprised that she was cast as one of the Kit Kat girls. I myself did two musicals in high school (Li'l Abner and Grease), and was the guy with the largest non-singing role in both. I auditioned more or less with the expectation that I wouldn't be in the show, but somehow I got cast as a Kit Kat boy. This involved a tiny bit of singing in the chorus, and a small amount of dancing.
Although I knew an astonishingly large number of Broadway musicals by heart and was hosting a musicals show titled The Body Electric at the time, I wasn't very familiar with Cabaret. That quickly changed, and it's now one of my favorites. In my mind the highlight of the show is the song Cabaret, where Sally Bowles, having chosen the club over love, sings this ode to having a good time. Depending on the staging and context this song can be despairing or defiant (I think ours was more the former), but when I hear the chorus in my head (which happens frequently) I tend to hear a version recorded by Satchmo very late in his career that is more of an upbeat "let's party" sort of song.
Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
It isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum
Sage advice that. I've tried hard to go out and enjoy life as much as I feasibly can, and while I'm as guilty as most of falling into a groove of repetitive patterns, at least my standard pattern gets me out of the house and exposes to a wide variety of music, film and food.
In any event, our production of Cabaret went well. Instead of staging it in a theater, we set up a temporary stage in a bar on campus. Liquor sales went on during the show, which certainly didn't hurt the ambiance. We even did a midnight showing, although most of the cast was trashed by the time it got started so it wasn't quite as good as the other shows we put on. Our Emcee was particularly good; he'd worked in live theater on cruise ships for a few years and had far more talent than we had any right to expect in a amateur production that was casting schlubs like me. A few years later in January 2001 my family saw the revival version of the show at the infamous Studio 54 in Manhattan, which was fantastic.
In Spring of 2000 I provided the voice of the book in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and with that my career in theater has ended. I'm ok with that, actually. I liked being on stage, but I loathed stage makeup beyond all measure and I didn't really have much talent besides a deep voice. Somewhat interestingly, even though I was in two consecutive shows with Footlighters and spent a lot of time with them in rehearsals, I can only remember the names of a very few of them, and most of those were people I was in other organizations with. I don't really talk to or see any of them any more, but I'll remember them (or at least their characters) for as long as I remember things. Until then, I'll go hear the music play as much as I can.
Tracklist
#1 - Welcome to the Jungle
#2 - Runnin' Blue
#3 - Cryin'
#4 - Mr. Jones
#5 - Blinded by the Light
#6 - Piano Man
#7 - Romeo & Juliet
#8 - Ecstasy
#9 - Seasons of Love
#10 - Red Sweater!
#11 - Insomniac
#12 - It Had to Be You
#13 - Cabaret
Come hear the music play.
Written by John Kander & Fred Ebb, performed by many, most famously Liza Minnelli.
Cabaret
So in my post about It Had to Be You I mentioned that my sister got me to do ballroom dancing the first semester of my first senior year in college, which was her first semester of her freshman year (Fall 1999, for those keeping score at home). The other thing she convinced me to be involved with was Footlighters, which was CWRU's at that time still nascent musical theater group. That semester's performance of Cabaret was just their fourth production ever.
Now, tigerlily_blue did a lot of musical theater in high school and was usually the female lead, so I wasn't at all surprised that she was cast as one of the Kit Kat girls. I myself did two musicals in high school (Li'l Abner and Grease), and was the guy with the largest non-singing role in both. I auditioned more or less with the expectation that I wouldn't be in the show, but somehow I got cast as a Kit Kat boy. This involved a tiny bit of singing in the chorus, and a small amount of dancing.
Although I knew an astonishingly large number of Broadway musicals by heart and was hosting a musicals show titled The Body Electric at the time, I wasn't very familiar with Cabaret. That quickly changed, and it's now one of my favorites. In my mind the highlight of the show is the song Cabaret, where Sally Bowles, having chosen the club over love, sings this ode to having a good time. Depending on the staging and context this song can be despairing or defiant (I think ours was more the former), but when I hear the chorus in my head (which happens frequently) I tend to hear a version recorded by Satchmo very late in his career that is more of an upbeat "let's party" sort of song.
Start by admitting
From cradle to tomb
It isn't that long a stay.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum
Sage advice that. I've tried hard to go out and enjoy life as much as I feasibly can, and while I'm as guilty as most of falling into a groove of repetitive patterns, at least my standard pattern gets me out of the house and exposes to a wide variety of music, film and food.
In any event, our production of Cabaret went well. Instead of staging it in a theater, we set up a temporary stage in a bar on campus. Liquor sales went on during the show, which certainly didn't hurt the ambiance. We even did a midnight showing, although most of the cast was trashed by the time it got started so it wasn't quite as good as the other shows we put on. Our Emcee was particularly good; he'd worked in live theater on cruise ships for a few years and had far more talent than we had any right to expect in a amateur production that was casting schlubs like me. A few years later in January 2001 my family saw the revival version of the show at the infamous Studio 54 in Manhattan, which was fantastic.
In Spring of 2000 I provided the voice of the book in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and with that my career in theater has ended. I'm ok with that, actually. I liked being on stage, but I loathed stage makeup beyond all measure and I didn't really have much talent besides a deep voice. Somewhat interestingly, even though I was in two consecutive shows with Footlighters and spent a lot of time with them in rehearsals, I can only remember the names of a very few of them, and most of those were people I was in other organizations with. I don't really talk to or see any of them any more, but I'll remember them (or at least their characters) for as long as I remember things. Until then, I'll go hear the music play as much as I can.
Tracklist
#1 - Welcome to the Jungle
#2 - Runnin' Blue
#3 - Cryin'
#4 - Mr. Jones
#5 - Blinded by the Light
#6 - Piano Man
#7 - Romeo & Juliet
#8 - Ecstasy
#9 - Seasons of Love
#10 - Red Sweater!
#11 - Insomniac
#12 - It Had to Be You
#13 - Cabaret