The creative team that were behind The Rocky Horror Show have turned their collective imagination to Cabaret and, led by director Matthew Wild, want to take us back to Berlin in the 1930s.
MATTHEW Wild starts his new job as Cape Town Opera artistic director next month, but first there is Cabaret to get through. And, then West Side Story which he will direct for the Fugard Theatre (on the Artscape premises) in July.
Drawing on the same production team that created last year’s successful The Rocky Horror Show, Wild is in rehearsals for Cabaret, which opens today.
In his own words, Wild thinks he is starting to be known as the go-to director for a musical, opera or theatre production that needs re-imagining. When he first started directing theatre he worked on mostly original works, but as he was drawn into opera and musicals he found he liked applying his imagination to works written by others to make them his own. “It is going to be quite Matthew Wild,” he says about Cabaret.
“I think my central approach always is to work out how to make the material as impactful on an audience as possible. For my opera work that sometimes involves a big shift in time, place or something else.
“Our central idea in this Cabaret is to make a modern audience really feel what they would have felt, walking into Berlin at that time.”
Kander and Ebb based Cabaret on an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s short novel, Goodbye to Berlin. Set in Berlin in 1931 just as the Nazis were rising to power, it is based around the nightlife of the seedy Kit Kat Klub and centres on 19-year-old English cabaret performer, Sally Bowles (played by Claire Taylor) and her relationship with young US writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Daniel Buys).
Wild visited Berlin six months ago and wandered around Isherwood haunts, but realised quickly that the city has changed drastically since then, even though Isherwood’s old apartment building still exists... the Kit Kat Club is now an organic supermarket.
So, they had to draw on historic research to help the performers create the characters, with a visit to the Holocaust Museum giving them insight into particular people.
“Berlin in the 1930s was the world’s capital of vice, a famous centre of jazz, music, booze and drugs and, above all, sex. And, of course, the very typical music of Berlin cabaret in the ’20s, which you hear a lot of in this musical.”
Wild is consciously making the Cliff character more like what Isherwood was than the one described by Kander and Ebb in the ’60s: “The big history of Cabaret is that the writers were too nervous to be completely frank. They wrote it and in particular made Cliff more straight. As the decades have gone on productions have made him a person who definitely will end up gay, is toying with the women but sleeping with the men as well.”
The production has to strike a balance between the politics of sex and the politics of the time, in particular the rise of Nazism, and several of the actors had to gets to grips with playing characters who bought into the systems ideals.
“The difficulty for the actors was getting into all these different mindsets, including some we are very scared of. It was important for the relevant characters to understand why people joining the Nazi party found it attractive.”
Wild thinks Cabaret is one of the best musicals written because of its context: “It reminds us of a period in history, before the storm. It’s not about the ultimate horror of the Holocaust, but the years before. It forces an audience to say, ‘if you were present when the storm clouds were gathering for a political catastrophe, what would you do?’
“The Weimar Republic had an incredibly liberal, and in modern terms, good democracy. It had a constitution comparable to ours and they were way ahead of others at that time. But, it was only around for a short time, it was incredibly fragile and this democracy created the conditions to allow Hitler in. Of course, when you watch, it is highly entertaining, but two thirds of the way in you’re asking, ‘if I was there, what would I have done and where I’m standing today, what should I be doing?’ “
• Cabaret runs at The Fugard Theatre from today to May 30.