Ruth Leon recommends… Come to the Cabaret – Amy Lennox
Ruth Leon recommends|
Come to the Cabaret – Amy Lennox This wonderful clip of Amy Lennox as Sally Bowles in the most recent London revival of Kander and Ebb’s great musical Cabaret, came to me from my friend Adele. Somehow I missed her performance at the Olivier Awards last year. She deserved to win an Olivier for this role but of course she wasn’t in the first cast (Amy Lennox, not Adele) and so wasn’t eligible. Sally Bowles, a scrappy, untalented English cabaret singer in the chaos that was Berlin in the ‘30s, was one of the great inventions of Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories from 1939. The Berlin Stories was adapted in 1951 by John van Druten into the Broadway play I Am a Camera which, in turn, in 1966, became Cabaret with a book by Joe Masteroff. Sally was a waif, one of the flotsam and jetsam trying to float in the debauchery and despair of a Berlin inhabited by desperate people unaware of the catstrophe that awaited them, trying to keep her uncertain balance in a world that was tilting away from her. Actually, not quite an invention; Sally Bowles was based on Jean Ross, a close friend of Isherwood’s during his Berlin days. |
Comments