Katie Buenneke – Stage Raw
By now, Kander and Ebb’s 1966 musical Cabaret is as much a part of the American musical theater canon as Oklahoma. While it’s much darker than most of its Rodgers and Hammerstein counterparts (save, perhaps, for Carousel), it now feels like an old standby, performed by regional theaters and colleges nationwide. Read more…
Rob Stevens – Haines His Way
Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 novel Berlin Stories was turned into a Broadway play called I Am A Camera in 1951 and later filmed, both starring a young Julie Harris as the desperate to be decadent cabaret performer Sally Bowles in 1930s Berlin…There have been many local productions over the years in theatres both big and small including one produced by McCoy Rigby Entertainment earlier this year in La Mirada. The tiny Celebration Theatre in Hollywood has just opened what is nearly an immersive staging and is most definitely an unforgettable production that any theatre aficionado cannot afford to miss. Read more…
Ellen Dostal – Musicals in LA
Kander & Ebb’s political musical Cabaret captures a horrific period in history. Set in 1929-1930 as the Nazis were coming into power, it is an unsparingly direct window into the deterioration of a country systematically brainwashed by the lunacy of a madman. It could never happen here, right? But history has a way of repeating itself, particularly when lessons have not been learned, and Celebration Theatre, director Michael Matthews, and the entire company of Celebration’s revival of Cabaret have one word for the audience – #Resist – or suffer the consequences. Read more…
Erin Conley – On Stage & Screen
“There was a cabaret, and there was a master of ceremonies, and there was a city called Berlin, in a country called Germany, and it was the end of the world.” Cabaret, the classic 1966 musical by Kander and Ebb is currently playing in Los Angeles in a lively and timely production at the intimate Celebration Theatre that demands the audience reexamine the story’s warnings against fascism in the light of current events. Read more…
Harker Jones – Arts In LA
Based on the play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten (itself based on Christopher Isherwood’s novel The Berlin Stories/Goodbye to Berlin), Cabaret is a legendary musical: both the eight-time Tony-winning 1966 Broadway production and the eight-time Oscar-winning 1972 film adaptation.
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Now running through August 17