ARTS & MANNERS

The tube saturates us these days with Tudormania (Henry VIII, Elizabeth R) and threatens a Stuart revival to rival in length the reigns of those unfortunates. Meanwhile, film continues to lavish attention on its decade, the 1930s, specifically on various faces of fascism. 1972 gets off to a splendid beginning with Cabaret, a tale of romance, late Weimar decadence and emergent Nazism set in 1931.

Based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, and also on assorted incarnations of those sketches over the years, Cabaret is superb drama enriched by music, not a “musical” padded with the usual tacked-on, hoked-up plot. While its story centers on an American showbiz-obsessed girl, her affair with a Cambridge graduate student, and their joint friendship with a wealthy German aristocrat, Cabaret’s theme is the gradual obliteration of freedom in Germany as the National Socialists rise from hooliganism to apparent idealism to— in the years after that covered by the film—supreme power. The device employed to relate story and theme is the cabaret, the Kit Kat Klub, where Sally Bowles and company perform their nightly commentaries on the real world.

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David Brudnoy

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The tube saturates us these days with Tudormania (Henry VIII, Elizabeth R) and threatens a Stuart revival to rival in length the reigns of those unfortunates. Meanwhile, film continues to lavish attention on its decade, the 1930s, specifically on various faces of fascism. 1972 gets off to a splendid beginning with Cabaret, a tale of romance, late Weimar decadence and emergent Nazism set in 1931.

Based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, and also on assorted incarnations of those sketches over the years, Cabaret is superb drama enriched by music, not a “musical” padded with the usual tacked-on, hoked-up plot. While its story centers on an American showbiz-obsessed girl, her affair with a Cambridge graduate student, and their joint friendship with a wealthy German aristocrat, Cabaret’s theme is the gradual obliteration of freedom in Germany as the National Socialists rise from hooliganism to apparent idealism to— in the years after that covered by the film—supreme power. The device employed to relate story and theme is the cabaret, the Kit Kat Klub, where Sally Bowles and company perform their nightly commentaries on the real world.