Cabaret Pt 1: 'You have to understand the way I am, mein herr.'

Three-Part Mini-Series
Occasionally we'll take a movie and baton pass it around the team and really dive in. If you missed past installments we've gone long and deep on Rebecca (1940), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966),  Rosemary's Baby (1968), Silence of the Lambs (1991), Thelma & Louise (1991), and A League of Their Own (1992). Now... Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) which is showing this weekend at the Quad Cinema in NYC - Editor

Team Experience is proud to present a three-part retrospective deep dive into Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), winner of 8 Oscars, and one of the most singular films ever made. Though it takes place on a stage it's entirely cinematic in a way many film musicals --even the ones that don't involve actual stages -- ever even think to be.

Part 1 by Nathaniel R

00:01 Cabaret begins in total silence with white text credits on a black screen. Countless movies begin this way, but not musicals. There is no bright and colorful title card, no overture to prep you for its famous song score. Cabaret takes place at the dead end of the Weimar era in Germany, and emerged onscreen at the dead end of the musical genre's dominance of movie culture. This is not lost on the genius dancer/choreographer turned film director Bob Fosse, who throws us immediately into a dark and dingy underworld... as if we've already eaten pomegranate seeds and sealed our fate...

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Still shook about "Cats" becoming a movie

by Nathaniel R

Betty Buckley in her Tony-winning role as "Grizabella, the glamour cat"By now you've heard the comic news (oh no wait, they're serious!) that "Cats" is being turned into a movie. The news took me so off guard that I was silent for five days. Cats got my tongue. (I'm sorry). The Andrew Lloyd Webber megahit from the 1980s was based on T.S. Elliott poems and as such it has no real story to speak of. It's basically a very successful song cycle (albeit with only one famous song "Memory") elevated by utter nonrealism in the form of humans pretending to be cats in campy makeup, tights, and acrobatic dancing. It's so hard to imagine as a movie that they made the potential of the making of one into a running joke in the play turned movie Six Degrees of Separation (1993). 

Grizabella the glamour cat is the marquee role but, in fact, it's a "featured" role since it's truly an ensemble show...

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Soundtracking: "Girl Crazy"

by Chris Feil

The Gershwin musical Girl Crazy was immortalized on screen by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in 1943, shortly after it arrived on Broadway and brought with it a handful of legendary numbers from the songwriting duo. George and Ira Gershwin are part of the American musical fabric, having crafted a treasure trove of a songbook where the source material has become irrelevant to the legacy of the songs themselves. Indeed, Girl Crazy would later be expanded and reconfigured to make one of the first jukebox musicals Crazy For You.

So even with screen legends like Garland and Rooney, the legendary tracks still only compare to decades of plentiful versions we have heard since. And while neither star (both carrying essentially the entire film’s musical weight) create definitive versions of these Gershwin songs, how could you? Part of the film’s charms from a contemporary perspective is how the musical numbers don’t feel encumbered by having to match a legacy...

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50 Kristins for Kristin's 50th

by Jorge Molina

Today, Tony, Emmy and Grammy-winner (that’s right, she only needs an Oscar to EGOT; get on it, Hollywood) and human ray of sunshine Kristin Chenoweth turns 50 years old. To honor her career, her legacy, and that impossibly high pitch matched only by her charisma, let’s take a look at 50 roles and appearances that she has gifted the world in almost three decades of work, in no particular order:

1) Her Broadway debut in an adaptation of Moliére’s Scapin as Hyacinth in 1996. 

2 & 3) Her two most iconic Broadway roles: A featured Tony-winning turn as Sally in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in 1999, and the Best Actress Tony-nominated performance as Glinda, the Good Witch in the world phenomenon that was Wicked in 2003.

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Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Review)

by Jorge Molina

Almost ten years ago to the date, Mamma Mia! opened in theaters. The jukebox musical based on the theater phenomenon that at the same time was based on the biggest hits of Europop sensation ABBA went on to gross almost 600 million dollars globally, and became the highest grossing live action musical ever. That movie seems to be divisive among fans of the genre because of the fluffy, silly and often nonsensical joy that poured out of the screens (you can read about the emotional connection I personally have with the movie here). 

Ten years and a Cher later, Donna and her Dynamos make a return to the island of Kalokairi with a sequel that doubles down on everything that made adamant fans of the first one fell in love with it, and made the skeptics roll their eyes...

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