She assumed the father of the child to be jazz pianist-and later film actor- Peter van Eyck. While rooming together with Isherwood at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg, Ross engaged in a series of brief heterosexual liaisons and became pregnant. In Berlin, Isherwood shared modest lodgings with 19-year-old British flapper Jean Ross, an aspiring film actress who earned her living as a chanteuse in lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets. He socialized with a coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles, and W.H. He relocated to Berlin in order to avail himself of underage male prostitutes and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets. At the time, Isherwood was an apprentice novelist who was politically indifferent about the rise of fascism in Germany. In 1929, Isherwood visited Weimar-era Berlin during the final months of the Golden Twenties. The events depicted in the 1966 musical are derived from Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical tales of his colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic. Writer Christopher Isherwood (left) and flapper Jean Ross (right) photographed in the 1930s. The award-winning musical inspired numerous subsequent productions in London and New York as well as the 1972 film of the same name.īackground Historical basis The original Broadway production opened on November 20, 1966, at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City and became a box office hit that ran for 1,166 performances. The musical depicts Weimar-era Berlin during this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national catastrophe that awaits them. Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, and the club itself serves as a metaphor for ominous political developments in late Weimar Germany. A subplot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor. Set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis are ascending to power, the musical focuses on the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub and revolves around American writer Clifford Bradshaw's relations with English cabaret performer Sally Bowles. The musical was based on John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera which was adapted from Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood which drew upon his experiences in the poverty-stricken Weimar Republic and his intimate friendship with nineteen-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. 1998 Tony Award for Best Musical RevivalĬabaret is a 1966 musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Joe Masteroff.1967 Tony Award for Best Original Score.
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