Yesterday afternoon, after I'd finished my chores, well some of them, I settled down to watch my favorite film Cabaret.
I probably haven't watched it for a couple of years, and it still thrilled me as much as the first time I saw it. I was still at school and Mum was going up to bed as it was coming on TV late at night, and she told me she didn't think I'd like it. HELLO, she was probably still in denial about her fourteen year old son at that time. I adored it, in fact it was nearly a road to Damascus moment for me.
The costumes, the Bob Fosse choreography, the actors, and of course Michael Yorke and Liza Minelli. It's got Fosse written all over it. Mum and I were lucky enough to get tickets to the opening night of the current production of Chicago when it came back to the West End in 99, the original cast including Ruthie Henshall and Ute Lemper. I also saw Jane Horrocks play Sally Bowles at the Donmar Warehouse, which was equally as magical.
From the time I first saw the film I developed a love for that period of German history. The Weimar Republic was a place of such change and confusion. The people were living under the strict guidelines of the Treaty of Versailles, and with daily massive inflation. Politically it was on a very precarious balance, Communism versus the Nazis. What I find frighterning is that I can see similarities with what is happening in Britain today. Then the scape goat was the Jews, today it's Muslims. Good ordinary people, who feel threatend, finding comfort in the first extremist party that they think might give them their voice back. It's happened in France already with the National Front winning seats in Marsailles.
Germany from the start of the twentieth century was also a mix of conservative catholic protestantism with a good dose of libealism thrown in. This Calvinistic country was the first country in the world to have a gay scene, including bars, clubs, newspapers. Research was carried out by Magnus Hirshfeld into the cause and effect of homosexuality which was truly ground breaking, he even received government backing.
The long and short of it was that I found it such a fascinating time in history that I did 40,000 words about it for the written part of my degree course.
Fifty years after Christopher Isherwood, on whose books the play/film was based, travelled by train to Germany from England, I followed in his footsteps, or should that be train tracks.
The world had changed beyond recognition in those fifty years, but I was thrilled to still find some of the excitment that Isherwood had craved and found in the 1930's.
There was actually a real Sally Bowles. Isherwood based her on a girl who was trying to break into the German film Industry, and she was a mill owner's daughter from LANCASHIRE. If l believed in reincarnation, perhaps I would be able to convince myself that my interest in that time and place in history, had some deeper, spookier meaning, and that I'd been there before.
Perhaps not. I wouldn't have passed the casting couch stage.
I probably haven't watched it for a couple of years, and it still thrilled me as much as the first time I saw it. I was still at school and Mum was going up to bed as it was coming on TV late at night, and she told me she didn't think I'd like it. HELLO, she was probably still in denial about her fourteen year old son at that time. I adored it, in fact it was nearly a road to Damascus moment for me.
The costumes, the Bob Fosse choreography, the actors, and of course Michael Yorke and Liza Minelli. It's got Fosse written all over it. Mum and I were lucky enough to get tickets to the opening night of the current production of Chicago when it came back to the West End in 99, the original cast including Ruthie Henshall and Ute Lemper. I also saw Jane Horrocks play Sally Bowles at the Donmar Warehouse, which was equally as magical.
From the time I first saw the film I developed a love for that period of German history. The Weimar Republic was a place of such change and confusion. The people were living under the strict guidelines of the Treaty of Versailles, and with daily massive inflation. Politically it was on a very precarious balance, Communism versus the Nazis. What I find frighterning is that I can see similarities with what is happening in Britain today. Then the scape goat was the Jews, today it's Muslims. Good ordinary people, who feel threatend, finding comfort in the first extremist party that they think might give them their voice back. It's happened in France already with the National Front winning seats in Marsailles.
Germany from the start of the twentieth century was also a mix of conservative catholic protestantism with a good dose of libealism thrown in. This Calvinistic country was the first country in the world to have a gay scene, including bars, clubs, newspapers. Research was carried out by Magnus Hirshfeld into the cause and effect of homosexuality which was truly ground breaking, he even received government backing.
The long and short of it was that I found it such a fascinating time in history that I did 40,000 words about it for the written part of my degree course.
Fifty years after Christopher Isherwood, on whose books the play/film was based, travelled by train to Germany from England, I followed in his footsteps, or should that be train tracks.
The world had changed beyond recognition in those fifty years, but I was thrilled to still find some of the excitment that Isherwood had craved and found in the 1930's.
There was actually a real Sally Bowles. Isherwood based her on a girl who was trying to break into the German film Industry, and she was a mill owner's daughter from LANCASHIRE. If l believed in reincarnation, perhaps I would be able to convince myself that my interest in that time and place in history, had some deeper, spookier meaning, and that I'd been there before.
Perhaps not. I wouldn't have passed the casting couch stage.