UB Theatre And Dance Department to Present "Cabaret"

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The menace and decadence of antebellum Berlin will be evoked on Nov. 14 when the University at Buffalo Department of Theatre and Dance presents Kander and Ebb's hit musical "Cabaret."

"Cabaret" is based on John Van Druten's 1951 play, "I Am a Camera," which, in turn, was based on Christopher Isherwood's book, "Goodbye to Berlin."

Performances will take place in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus at 8 p.m. on Thursdays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. on Sundays through Nov. 24.

Ticket prices are $10 for general admission and $5 for students, seniors and children. Tickets may be obtained through the UB Center for the Arts box office, 645-ARTS, or through all Ticketmaster outlets, 852-5000.

"Cabaret" opened on Broadway in 1967 to nearly unanimous critical praise and audience appreciation. It went on to win eight Tony Awards and the New York Drama Critics Award.

The plot focuses on Sally Bowles, a self-dramatizing English girl, half-tart, half-child, who works as a singer in the lively world of 1930s Berlin cabaret, and basks in the last glow of a dying world about to explode in war. A second featured player is Isherwood himself, a homosexual Englishman who admires Sally from afar and becomes, for her, a platonic friend and a camera.

At the end of the play, the "camera" leaves to develop the portentous "pictures" he's taken of life among Berlin's working classes, demi-mondaines and Nazis. The subsequent film starred Liza Minelli in her major screen role and won eight Academy Awards, becoming a hallmark of everything grand and tragic in modern musical theater.

Gerald Finnegan directs the UB production, with choreography by Lynn Kurdziel-Formato. They intend, they say, to capture the play's frenetic, chaotic mien and the dark underside of the times. Finnegan sees in the play correspondences to contemporary life, in which self-interest and hedonism often deflect us from the hideous social problems that populate the world stage.