What sort of story can endure a series of metamorphoses from Christopher Isherwood’s 1945 Berlin Stories, through various stage versions and a previous film, and come out better for it? Bob Fosse’s 1971 Cabaret is a densely nuanced reduction (I mean that in a fine culinary sense) of history and love. This is no ordinary re-make. Isherwood began with a set of novellas, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, published during WW II, set in Berlin Germany in the early stages of the Nazi regime. Isherwood serves many plots and subplots, and many themes. Cabaret expands on several, framing them in extraordinary music and putting them in the hands of extraordinary actors and artists. The screenplay by Jay Presson Allen picks up on the tension and fervor of the Nazi party in demoralized Germany and presents it as the façade we know in retrospect that it was. The relevance today is timely. See this film and relate it to our times, our world.

The story of Cabaret brings us in close quarters with the roller-coaster affairs of a nightclub entertainer Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli), Brian (Michael York), nightclub host Joel Grey, and the various company they keep. Each character struggles with, among rich earthly pleasures, the difficulty of being honest. What must one be honest about, after all? And then how? Isherwood later disavowed his writing as unconscionably distanced. His famous line “I am a camera” concerned him later, and the strain each character exhibits, highlighted in this movie version, comes from being torn between actions, or action and inaction. This theme connects the personal affairs with the historical, and makes the point so fresh today.