What do you think of when you think of cabaret?
You probably think of Cabaret, the 1972 Bob Fosse film starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, set in late 1920s Germany, in the decline of the Roaring Twenties and amidst the rise of Nazism. That’s what Google thinks I want to read about when I type “cabaret” into the AI-diseased search engine, at any rate. It’s not a bad thing to read about, but not exactly what I’m looking for.
The reality is that cabaret – historical, traditional or modern – bears very little resemblance to Cabaret, the film. Hell, not even Cabaret the musical in its original form bears a huge amount of resemblance to Cabaret the film (revivals will almost always swap in the two best songs written for the film “Mein Herr” and “Maybe This Time”), and neither do many popular revivals over the years, including Auckland Theatre Company’s 2010 revival directed by Michael Hurst, and presumably the company’s upcoming revival later this year directed by Benjamin Henson.
If you take it back to its roots, cabaret was not the name of the artform, but the name of the space where the artform took place. It originated in Europe, primarily France, in venues that might be relatively familiar to you, Le Chat Noir, or Moulin Rouge (popularized by, well, the venue, and various films). These were nightlife spaces where musical performers mingled amongst the communities arrayed to see them, where both alcohol and food flowed freely, and the boundaries between art and audience were slim. Art always exists for an audience, an audience in turn exists for art, but these spaces made it explicit. The form these spaces served made it explicit.
Other countries have had their own takes on the form and these spaces, like kleinkunst in the Netherlands, kabarett in Germany, and so on and so forth. Cabaret in Aotearoa has its own expressions, be it from genres and forms that emerge from here, like showbands (the Modern Māori Quartet being the most famous contemporary example of this), or ones that we import, absorb and borrow.
Before this becomes a history novel, what I mean to say is that cabaret has a long history that predates the images and sounds you’re likely familiar with. You’re also probably conflating it a little with burlesque, a little bit with drag, maybe even a little bit with circus, and to be fair, there are definitely the occasional overlaps between those forms as well.
You might have a few more images in your mind. Maybe a little Marlene Dietrich, maybe Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge!, maybe Jinkx Monsoon, maybe Eartha Kitt, maybe Harvey Fierstein.
So what is cabaret? Is it a vibe or is it a specific form? My opinion is that it sits somewhere in between the two.
Take a look at the programme for Auckland Cabaret Festival, which has been run on-and-off for over a decade now by Auckland Live, before settling in at its current home at the Civic Theatre. It includes the likes of La Gateau Chocolat, performing a medley of picks from The Sound of Music to Frozen to Cats to, yes, Cabaret; Sugar, a solo work about a genderfluid twink discovering the value of “transactional relationships”; and the 30th anniversary celebration/showcase of Caluzzi, Auckland’s own drag/K’Rd/cabaret/dinner theatre legends (choose applicable), which is perhaps the longest-running cabaret show in the country.
There are a few things that overlap between these. They all involve music. They’re all, frankly, pretty gay. They all seem to be about celebration. They’re all broadly, a pretty damn good time.
But there’s also a political side of cabaret. A side that welcomes the misfits, the queers, the people who don’t feel like they fit into the nine-to-five.
Which leads to the act that I’m most excited about: Dangerous Goods, by Australian collective Polytoxic, led by Lisa Fa’alafi and Leah Shelton. The former created Hot Brown Honey, which came to Auckland in 2017 for Auckland Pride Festival and is one of the best shows that I’ve ever seen. It involved a massive beehive on stage, fierce performers, including Busty Beats (absolutely RIP) commanding the Kiri Te Kanawa stage like it had never been before or since.If Dangerous Goods is half as wild, half as raucous, half as edgy, and a fraction as intelligent and powerful as that show was, I’m still guaranteed a great time.
The other thing with cabaret is that it is often a Trojan horse for radical ideas, expressions, and concepts. For my money, and opinion, cabaret takes the best of several artforms and blends them together. It takes the virtuosicity of a concert. It takes the communal aspect of live theatre. It takes the back and forth of stand-up. It mashes them all up into, and sorry to quote Alanis Morissette (is Alanis cabaret?), a jagged little pill where you feel every edge of it as you swallow it – and love every moment.
