Hello and thank you for downloading this edition of the Witness Podcast with me for Hana Hiva.

And today we head back to New York in November 1966 and the opening night of the hit musical Cabaret.

I've been speaking to the man who directed the groundbreaking

original Broadway production 50 years ago. The opening night of Cabaret was just sensational. It was thrilling. It was sort of structured

unlike anything anybody had seen in a long time.

What good is sitting alone in your room?

In 1966, Harold Prince was an established name on Broadway,

having produced hugely successful musicals such as Westside Story and Fiddle

on the roof. But now he was trying something different. He was going to direct, and the

subject matter was not the usual material for musicals.

Set in 1930s Berlin, cabaret centres around the nightlife at the CD Kitcat Club as the Nazis are rising to power. Center with a 19 year old girl, Sally Bowles.

The musical was based on Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories,

but as Hal Prince says,

the musical differed a lot from the original.

Everybody expected it would be the Sally Bowles story and it would be, you know, much more

conventional musical. Instead, the whole trajectory of the show was completely unprecedented.

Everybody said, what in hell is amusing about a

musical comedy about Nazis? Well I'm not sure it was amusing but it was

sure stimulating and people loved it. How did the plot, the cabaret plot, differ from the original?

A great deal.

Issue would be the first to say that his books were not what we dramatized. In fact I think it ticked him off a little bit because

the two Berlin stories were so different. But there was a Sally Bowles character,

...