Cabaret: Orig. Stage vs Film

Bob Fosse was feuding with Harold Prince, so the last thing he wanted was to reproduce the stage version. This explains his initial reluctance to use Joel Gray. Fortunately producer Cy Feuer insisted. The first change Fosse and Feuer made was confining all but one musical number to the stage of the Kit Kat Klub. The stage version was an uneasy combination of book and concept musical. Prince deserves credit for adding the Emcee, in the style of the German Kabarett, to comment on life outside the cabaret. But the ability of film to cross cut between the cabaret numbers and the outside world makes for a more fluid connection. The other major change was dropping "the entire secondary story--that soupy, sentimental, idiotic business with the little old Jewish man[Herr Schultz] courting Sally's landlady[Fraulein Schneider] ... [and] putin a decent secondary love story."[Cy Feuer] This involves two other characters from Isherwood [Fritz Wendel & Natalia Landauer]. The only drawback of this is the loss of the two Kurt Weill style songs "So What?" and "What Would You Do?", originally sung by Weill's widow Lotte Lenya. This rest of the dropped songs are no loss.

Not having seen the original production it's hard to assess Ron Field's choreography, but it
apparently involved 1920s dances involving the cabaret patrons despite the fact that the
cabarets were not dance clubs. I think it's safe to say that Fosse's choreography is more
sensual. He tried to put himself in the shoes of a second rate choreographer who would be
working in such a club as the Kit Kat Klub. He worried that some of the moves were too
blatant, but Fosse's sophistication came through to produce elegant sleaze.

The film featured a new level of authenticity. Filming in Germany helped. Joel Gray studied
with a dialect coach to achieve an authentic Berlin accent. Fosse cast European dancers for
4 of the Kit Kat girls. And he chose dancers that looked buxom and well-fed and forbade
them from shaving their underarms during filming. And Fosse and assistant director Wolfgang
Glattes would search for interesting German faces for the cabaret scenes. Having difficulty
finding photographs of the cabarets of the period Fosse and his designers turned to artwork
particularly those of George Grosz and Otto Dix. For example the shot of a severe looking
woman with a monocle was based on a Dix painting.

Overall I'd say the film is big improvement over the stage version.