Theater is what dies every night at 11. Or that’s what it
used to be.
But what if some of the greatest shows of the past — shows
that ran before your time and closed before the advent of archival video —
could be brought back to life? Or at least a kind of half-life?
اضافة اعلان
Thanks to new technology, old-fashioned luck and curatorial
mania, that’s happening. Among the shows recently “reanimated” is the original
production of the groundbreaking Broadway musical “
Cabaret.” If you ever wanted
to see how it moved, and how it was moving, now you can.
In a series of astonishing scenes created by Doug Reside,
curator of the
Billy Rose Theater Division at the New York Public Library, we
discover exactly how Joel Grey, as the impish master of ceremonies of the Kit Kat
Klub, danced with his chorus of tatty Weimar-era “virgins.” We also see how the
giant mirror — a key image in director Hal Prince’s influential staging — looms
behind them as they sing “Willkommen,” and how it later tilts to implicate us
in the audience.
The story of the reanimations goes back to 1966, when
Prince, who was not just the director but also the producer of “Cabaret,” hired
the Friedman-Abeles studio to take publicity photos during a dress rehearsal
before the first Broadway preview that fall. As was not uncommon — but proved
uncommonly lucky — Prince soon asked the photographers back to reshoot the show
after he’d made final changes, and then again for the first national tour in
1967 and the second in 1969.
The result, if you look just at the still images, is a
marvelous but bewildering jumble, with different performers performing the same
roles and staging. You see Grey at some point turn into one of his tour
replacements, Jay Fox, in different makeup but nearly identical poses. And you
see Jill Haworth, who originated the role of the divinely decadent Sally
Bowles, suddenly go from a blonde at the dress rehearsal to a brunette by
opening night. (Prince had ordered a wig change.) Then she “becomes” Melissa
Hart. Then Tandy Cronyn.
Years later, 3,694 of these “Cabaret” images were among a
trove of the studio’s work donated to the library. A tremendous resource for
theater historians, they were nevertheless difficult to work with and awkward
to share with the public. As Reside described the viewing process: “We’d give
you a loupe and a light table and say good luck.”
But as he recently began to digitize some of the
collection’s most important photographs, it occurred to Reside that if a show
had produced enough good images in quick sequence, the digitizations could be
stitched together in Google Photos to make GIF-like animations. “Cabaret” was
ripe for this treatment: By the 1960s, professional cameras like the ones used
by Friedman-Abeles were equipped with quick-advance mechanisms that allowed
them to take more shots per minute than conventional cameras did, rather like
“bursts” today.
This year, having already animated selections from “West
Side Story” and “Company,” Reside set to work on “Cabaret.” After gathering the
digitized stills, he assembled them into scenes and then individual moments,
using the library’s copy of Joe Masteroff’s script and tape recording of the
audio as guides. Many proved unusable, but 350 of them, fed into Google’s
animation tool, produced 70 GIFs, ranging from three to 18 images each.
The kiss of technology seemed to awaken the show’s sleeping
aura. The central romance of Sally and Clifford Bradshaw (Bert Convy) sprang to
life in a few animated seconds of the scene in which she charms her way into
his one-bed flat. The intricacies of Ronald Field’s choreography were revealed
in the assembled pieces of “Two Ladies,” the Kander and Ebb song in which the
master of ceremonies and his chorines comment on unorthodox living arrangements
like those of Sally and Cliff.
Reanimated choreography is among the most valuable gifts of
the GIFs. When video is unavailable and dances have not been notated for
posterity, spliced-together sequences of stills may be a crucial tool. Not just
for preserving elaborate production numbers like “The Telephone Song” — cut
from the 1972 movie and mostly lost to time — but also in preserving the way
actors’ bodies simply existed in space. The feistiness and then the resignation
of Cliff’s landlady, Frau Schneider, emerge in just a few quick glimpses of the
great Lotte Lenya’s performance, known to most theater fans only from her
vocals on the original cast recording.
When you see these characters move, you can see what they’re
thinking. And when you see the show move, you can see what it’s thinking, too.
In some cases, you can also see what it decided not to show
you. One ominous “Cabaret” scene, staged in silhouette, represents the growing
political furor surrounding the characters as fascists gain power in Germany in
1929 and 1930. Prince, who was seldom precious about his ideas, cut it between
the dress rehearsal and opening, whether for commercial or aesthetic reasons,
we don’t know. Either way, Reside’s animations rescue this bit of theatrical
history and let us feel its horror.
Photographs, of course, can preserve a show’s great moments,
frame by frame. But frames aren’t what you see as you look at a stage. You see
a string of images, blurred into one.
No photographer can capture an eye roll in one shot. In a
single still, a dance step is just a dance pose.
Nor can photographs really convey how two sets of
performers, in the same roles at different times — or one performer in
different wigs — bring different nuances to the living art of seduction.
Pirated videos, even professional films, miss something
else. They seem ordinary, perhaps because we are so used to seeing the world
that way. But theater is, and will always be, strange.
Reside’s animations uniquely capture that strangeness. If
they are slightly creepy and marionettelike, that’s part of why they are
moving. They turn then into now but only partway.
That “partway” is where our great stage memories live. If
tomorrow belongs to me, as the master of ceremonies sings, yesterday belongs to
the theater. It is an art form in which golden moments fall into the past just
a blink or two faster than we can catch them.
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