Comparison Essay : Cabaret and Chicago!!

                     ‘Great!’, ‘Dazzling’, ‘Electric!’. Cabaret and Chicago are 2 musicals directed by Bob Fosse and Rob Marshall which won multiple Academy Awards in its time. Cabaret in 1972 starred Liza Minnelli, and Chicago made in 2002 starred numerous Hollywood celebrities. Both musicals bear striking similarities, as well as differences to one another in terms of their narration style, musical numbers, themes and cinematography.

                Chicago and Cabaret are very similar as well as different in their narrative style and opening sequence. Chicago starts off with sexy jazz music in the Onyx Club, and we see a woman hiding a gun with blood. The Master of Ceremonies announces the act and we see her in sexy attire as she starts the number; ‘All That Jazz’. Cabaret’s beginning is similar, where in the establishing shot, we see a crowd of people through a reflection in a club- The Kit Kat Club, and are introduced to the time, ‘Berlin 1931’. We see the reflection of a man and he smiles eerily. ‘Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome to Cabaret!” and he introduces himself as the Master of Ceremonies. He asks not only the audience in the film, but also us, whether we feel good, and he says ‘ So life is disappointing? , In here life is beautiful”. The music in Cabaret is unlike the jazz music in Chicago, it is more circus-like. The emcees play very important roles throughout the musicals. In Chicago, the emcee appears to announce every act performed and he is present to give a sense of formality to the next performance, to give it the wow factor. In Cabaret, the emcee performs some of the numbers himself and gives his opinions and thoughts as well. Joel Grey in Cabaret acts as an observer JUST like us. He witnesses what happens in the plot. For example, the moment when Fritz finds himself in a dilemma when he falls in love with a Jewish girl, the following number that ensues is ‘If you could see her through my eyes’, and he sings along with a gorilla, he looks into the camera and says the last line of the song, ‘She wouldn’t look Jewish at all’, and through that he’s already looking straight at us and giving us a piece of his mind.

               In Chicago and Cabaret, the musical numbers are essential in moving the plot along although they do so in different ways. In Chicago, there are only TWO musical numbers that are actually performed in the reality of the film, which is the first song- ‘All that Jazz’ and the last song- ‘Nowadays,’ and here we also see the symmetry of the film where it starts and ends with a ‘real’ performance. The rest of the songs are the insights into Roxie Hart’s mind, and they are a figment of her own imagination and interpretation. In contrast to this, in Cabaret, only two characters sing throughout the show, Sally and the emcee. The musical numbers in Cabaret differ in terms of usage because it’s used as a form of interacting with the audience(us). The songs either sum up or prepares the audience for what is about to happen in the film. In both musicals, cross cutting and montage occurs between the songs and reality, between expressionism and realism. In Chicago, “Funny Honey” is a good example of this. Roxie sings about her husband’s undying love for her, she sings it in a tune of mockery instead of consensual love. It is expressionistic as we see her singing on the left while he testifies on the right and the cinematography is brilliant as the coloured lighting creates a dreamy effect. In Cabaret, the first number that Sally Bowles sings is ‘Mein Herr’, where she sings about how a man would be better off without her and this is preparing the audience for the rest of the show when we find out that she sleeps with multiple men and aborts her baby. In terms of cinematography, soft focus is used in her rendition of ‘Maybe This Time’ to accentuate her beauty.

                Bob Fosse, the director of Cabaret, choreographed for both Cabaret and Chicago, therefore explaining why both films bear significant resemblance in terms of the dance movements- tap dance and sexual movements were seen in both musicals. ‘He developed a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable due to the fact that it exuded a stylized, cynical sexuality’ (Wikipedia). A lot of the dance moves involved the spreading of the legs and in Queen Latifah’s number, it was highly sexual when she pulled the green cloth out of her cleavage and whipped it between her thighs. Cabaret on the other hand, was not as sexual but very animated especially in the song, ‘Money’. The only sexual thing shown was the bouncing of the breast and penis, with the ‘ka ching’ sound and it was more comedic than sexual. In Cabaret, sex wasn’t spoken of openly unlike in Chicago, it was more subtle, especially the scene were Brian told Sally that he slept with Max as well, all he said was ‘So did I’ when she referred to screwing him.

               The themes dealt with in both musicals are different and coincides with when the movie was made about. From the Quotations of Chairman Rey, ‘All narratives exists in 3 times, the time they were made about, the time they were authored, the present time of the audience watching Now’(Adprosebud). Chicago was made in 2002, and was based on the time of the Jazz era in the 1920s in Chicago and because of this, a bulk of the songs were jazz numbers. The theme dealt with celebrity fame and power of the media. Seeing how Billy Flynn manipulated the media and society’s view in order to win a court case showed how fake people can be. In contrast to this, Cabaret was made in 1972 about a time in 1931 in Berlin, Germany and we know that this was the time where the Nazis were gaining power and influence. In Chicago, there were scenes of murder but it wasn’t looked at in a very violent way but in Cabaret, there is underlying violence throughout the show. There is a contrast between the type of club the Onyx and Kit Kat was, the Onyx was a place to have fun but the Kit Kat Club was a place to escape reality and the violence outside, and enter a world where everything is beautiful. Throughout the entire film, we see shots that were in relation to the Nazis, one where a bunch of Nazi soldiers surrounded a dead body on the street and stared at it, they stood in a frozen position, signifying the absence of emotions. During the musical numbers, there were cross cuts between the musical numbers and Nazi violence- when Natalia’s cat was killed and put on her doorstep and we could hear shouts saying, ‘Jew, Jew,Jew’. One extremely eerie scene to sum up this very theme comes right at the end, where we see the audience being dominated by a large number of Nazis. This would probably also be a reason why most of the musical numbers are very comedic, it makes the audience laugh in order to provide some sort of balance and symmetry to the darker side of the film.

                   All in all, Chicago and Cabaret are two musicals that are so similar yet so different, a final comparison would be that both musicals started similarly but if one looks at their respective endings, Chicago ended on a feel-good note, having Velma and Roxie back on stage with a standing ovation. In contrast, Cabaret ended in a bittersweet way, with Brian leaving and Sally singing Cabaret; by definition; ‘is a form of comedy, song and dance,’(Wikipedia) bringing some optimism to how life is to balance the fact that the audience was filled with Nazis.