Cabaret

Cabaret has gone through many rewrites. Bob Fosse's film brought the text closer to Christopher Ishwerwood's original stories. Revivals turned the subtext into text. But from the beginning the show turned a mirror on a hedonistic society that ignores politics at their peril.

She Loves Me

GEORGE: You’ve never really looked at me.

AMALIA: I’m looking at you right now- and shall I tell you what I see? A smug, pompous, petty tyrant-very sure of himself and very ambitious.

But I see him ten years from now- selling shampoo.

And twenty years from now-selling shampoo.

And thirty years from now still selling shampoo!

Because, basically, you know what he is? Just a not-very-bright, not-very-handsome, not-very-young man with balding hair and the personality of a python!

Is this a couple you want to get together? Oddly enough yes. 

She Loves Me is a rare romcom where neither of the sparring lovers has to rewrite their personality to come together at the final curtain. By setting them in a larger workplace drama we see the tensions that are causing them to lash out and the good qualities that will make them compatible when they take the time to really see each other. The show loses money in a large house but delights in a black box.

Fiorello

There are lots of shows I want to draw but life and rehearsals are getting in the way. Up today is the first in a series of shows by Bock and Harnick. Best known for Fiddler on the Roof this team has written many delightful shows that have resurfaced in the New York's Encores series.

I've covered The Body Beautiful in the past. Fiorello! was their first big hit, running 795 performances and winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama. It also tied with The Sound of Music for the best musical Tony, beating the beloved Gypsy! 

The best-remembered songs in Fiorello go to the leading ladies. Fiorello himself has little to sing. After the 2013 concert the New York Times wrote:

"Unfortunately single-minded, incorruptible people with a Mission (in this case, to save New York from the moral slime of Tammany Hall politics) tend to lack many arrows in their psychological quivers. And even with a new second-act number (written not long before Bock died in 2010) in which Fiorello bares his soul after losing both his first mayoral run and his first wife, the character remains a gleaming brass instrument with a limited range of notes to play."

Next up: Tenderloin!