Christopher Isherwood wasn’t particularly elated when his book ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ morphed into a Broadway musical; how would he like the Israeli version?
Christopher Isherwood did not go to see the musical “Cabaret.” “I’ve never seen it … Everybody warned me that I wouldn’t like it,” he said in a 1970 interview with Otto Friedrich, author of “Before the Deluge: a Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s” (Harper & Row, 1972 ). But was the writer really never tempted to see the stage version of his successful book, “Goodbye to Berlin”? “Oh, I’ve seen vulgarities so often,” he answered. “They always manage to find out you’re in the theater, and then there’s the question of going backstage. Why pull a long face, and be nasty and ungracious? It pays me money, so why fight the goose that lays the golden egg?”Olla Shor-Selector, Aki Avni, Itay Tiran, Miki Kam, Gadi Yagil and the actors appearing in the Cameri’s new production of “Cabaret” in Tel Aviv, directed by Omri Nitzan, will also not have to suffer criticism by the blue-eyed British-American writer, who was born in 1904 and died in 1986. But the “Cabaret” goose – appearing on stages all over the world, made into a successful movie and added to the 20th-century pantheon of popular culture – continues to lay golden eggs, despite the reservations voiced by Isherwood. The writer did agree to see the film, whereupon he declared that its makers had exaggerated the decadent lifestyle in pre-Nazi Berlin, were unfaithful to the book’s restrained tone and some of the political messages it contained, and approached the subject of homosexuality as if it were an embarrassment.