20th C Decadence: Cabaret and Salome

On my recent London trip, I experienced two visions of early twentieth century decadence: the musical Cabaret and, on the way back, the Metropolitan Opera's live broadcast DVD version of Richard Strauss' Salome. Despite the efforts of the Cabaret production team to shock us with 21st century sexuality, the 1905 Strauss opera had the greater impact and shock value.

This production of Cabaret has been playing for over a year in London, with an evolving cast. You enter the theater by descending a narrow, vaguely ominous stairway, and traverse several smoky corridors before emerging into a modified theater in which the ground floor is set up as a club, with small tables, people drinking cocktails, and entertainment by scantily clad musicians playing jazz on accordions, violins, and clarinets. This is a memorable intro to the portrayed decadence of 1930's Berlin, the setting of the play. I was seated in the "club" area, but other patrons were seated in traditional theater seats above, peering down onto the proceedings like 1800's medical students observing a dissection from an amphitheater. 

Once the play began, I immediately noted the differences between it and the famed 1972 film version that memorably starred Liza Minelli and Joel Grey. The staged version, which first opened in 1966, was based on stories by British writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin in the pre-Nazi era and was an avid participant in the vibrant gay Berlin nightclub scene. He fled Germany in 1933 to avoid Nazi prosecution. The musical, set almost entirely within a Berlin cabaret, was a long running hit, and has had multiple subsequent productions (including on one of my favorite TV comedies, Schitt's Creek). Its legendary songs and choreography are what many of us think of when envisioning that inter-war era in Germany; the cabaret acts as a metaphor for the times, becoming more antisemitic and harsh as the Nazis come to power. When director Bob Fosse adapted the play for Hollywood in 1972, however, he made multiple changes. Most significant were the excision of a subplot involving a Jewish businessman and his non-Jewish German girlfriend. Their doomed relationship made the antisemitism plot explicit. But in now viewing the original stage version, I realized that the excision of this subplot was a good call by Fosse. First, these characters' three songs were unmemorable. Just as important, the edited-down film was an equally powerful indictment of antisemitism, but done more subtly, relying on the viewer's knowledge of history to fill in the gaps and experience the horror. Usually our own imagination is more vivid than what is explicitly shown us. So for me, the staged version was a bit too long.

The staging and direction by Rebecca Frecknall used several ideas to update the production for our century. The gay/queer dialogue and choreography was more explicit than in the movie--more simulated sex, less clothing, some overt dialogue about gay baths and sex . 

Maybe this overtness is needed in our casually sexualized internet society in which more is always needed to shock. But paradoxically, while the choreography and dialogue were more explicit than the film's, the play had much less shock value and lasciviousness than the movie did. Just to be sure, I viewed the movie at home on returning home. I was not just being nostalgic--louder does not equate to more emotive, and more explicit does not equate to sexier. 

The roles of Sally Bowles and the Emcee were played by black actors Marish Wallace and Billy Porter (white actors are the norm, including in the London casts), and the Emcee seemed more overtly gay rather than Joel Gray's magnificently ambisexual version in the film. Wallace had a big voice, but her role was often over-sung, and lacked the subtlety of Minelli's film version (admittedly a high bar to reach). Porter's Emcee also lacked the nuance of Joel Gray, and played the role more for in your face comedy and sexuality. I think the director needed to trust our imaginations more, rather than clubbing us over the head. In the end, while it was good to see another take on this classic, I left a bit underwhelmed and not very shocked. 

The Metropolitan Opera's excellent Salome did shock, as it usually does. Richard Strauss wrote it in 1905, based on the play by Oscar Wilde from 1891. The play was banned in Britain until 1931, and can be summarized as: the teenage Salome, daughter-in-law of Herod, falls in love with the imprisoned John the Baptist, demands his beheading, then fetishizes his decapitated head, and is killed by her outraged father. Strauss writes incredible, descriptive, overwhelming music to portray theses decadent events. The shock effect is amplified by the intensity of the music combined with a taut, 90 minute, single act structure. Cabaret by comparison seemed much longer. 

The new Metropolitan Opera production takes advantage of the huge Met stage by using scene changes that visibly elevate the floor of the palace high into the air to reveal the deep, underlying crypt in which John the Baptist is imprisoned. A bit like Madama Butterfly, the protagonist in Salome needs to portray a teenager who can sing over a massive orchestra and portray very adult (and here, demented) emotions. South African soprano Elza van den Heever was youthful, wonderfully dramatic and solid vocally, if not at the towering level of say, Birgit Nilsson. She convincingly showed Salome's transition from lovestruck teen to obsessive predatory lover, and her blood-soaked dance with John's severed head, sometimes awkward on stage, made me cringe (good!). This was a very risk-taking performance. You don't see the soprano lick the blood from the severed head very often in productions!

The director tried to show us how Salome evolved from a (perhaps) sexually abused young girl into an adult monster by featuring a small group of (non-singing) younger Salomes who appeared throughout the performance. 

This attempt to psychoanalyze Salome was an interesting choice, and I think OK, since the opera stemmed from the Freudian period. The only bad choice in this directorial interpretation was beginning the opera not with Strauss' eerie ascending clarinet solo, but instead with the sounds of a music box (playing a theme from the opera), being played with by one of the young Salomes. Some operas like this one begin with amazing mood-setting music (eg Otello, Elektra, Madama Butterfly), and I think this directorial choice spoiled the  musical introduction and spoiled this effect for me. 

Swedish baritone Peter Mattei was superb as John the Baptist, sounding quite holy with a clarion voice, yet giving subtle signs that he too was sexually aroused by the teenage princess. The stage direction by German Claus Guth was effective, and the orchestra sounded excellent under music director Yannick Nézat-Séguin, if not quite reaching the primal virtuosity of the Vienna Philharmonic that I heard in the production of Strauss' Elektra in Vienna last year. The power of Salome is such that, even in a broadcast version seen in a large theater, I left overwhelmed and creeped out, more that in the live Cabaret in an intimate London club.