Performers and spectators exist alongside each other across the building throughout the evening. The proscenium has been broken through as the show is performed in-the-round. Flanking the auditorium walls are monocled, moustachioed masks by artist Anya Allin. In The Gold Bar, artist Dominic Myatt has provided murals that give a cheeky nod to the classical paintings that adorn the walls and ceilings of London’s theatres – looks out for the craggy gold centrepiece. The Prologue performers – nine professional musicians and dancers – roam the building and bars whilst the audience arrives. Ticketholders are encouraged to arrive early to allow time to explore every nook and cranny of the club. From the roadside views of the River Thames and London Eye, you step into a dark, red-lit labyrinth of corridors and are transported to the Weimar Republic era of Cabaret. The Playhouse Theatre, located moments away from Embankment Tube station, has been transformed and masterfully shrunk into an intimate, seductive and secretive Berlin-style club. This spring, it welcomes some stellar additions to the cast: Everybody’s Talking About Jamie‘s John McCrea as the Emcee, Nathan Ives-Moiba ( As You Like It, Tull) as Cliff Bradshaw and Se x Education‘s Aimee Lou Wood as Sally Bowles. Fast-forward to today and it is the most-awarded musical revival in the history of the Olivier Awards, scooping up seven of its 11 nominations at the 2022 ceremony. The first Broadway production went on to run for more than a thousand performances with English starlet Jill Haworth and a teenage Liza Minnelli both starring as Sally when it moved to London in 1968, Judi Dench took the role. Reviews were initially mixed, but the public was electrified. By 1966 they had collectively evolved a concept that broke with Broadway conventions. ![]() Come the 1960s, Broadway producer-director Harold Prince acquired the rights for a musical adaptation and assembled the crack team of Jow Masteroff (book), John Kander (music) and Fred Ebb (lyrics). It transferred to London three years later and then became an awkward film that tackled the topics of sex and abortion gingerly. Goodbye to Berlin was received so well in Britain and America that, in 1951, the Sally Bowles strand was adapted for Broadway by John Van Druten and titled I Am a Camera (due to Isherwood’s presentation of his role as an asexual observer to the events). Instead of focusing on his homoerotic cavorting, however, he focuses on Sally Bowles, a character drawn from his friend and flatmate Jean Ross, an upper-middle-glass English 20-year-old eking out a rackety existence in Berlin, singing (rather badly) in one of the many Jewish-run cabarets. His experiences inspired six interwoven stories published in 1939 at Goodby to Berlin. Enjoying the city’s Jazz Age cabarets and swinging in and out of liaisons with underage male prostitutes, Isherwood’s escapades took place as fascism gained strength in Germany. It was a time he has described as ‘a period of ecstasy, sentimentality, worry, hope and clock-watching’. ![]() Between 19, Anglo-American novelist, playwright and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood lived intermittently in Berlin.
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