Cabaret: stage vs screen

Bob Fosse's 1972 film of Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles, Michael York, and Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies, won eight Academy Awards. Jay Presson Allen's screenplay drew on the 1966 Broadway musical and on the sources behind it, the play I Am a Camera and Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories, and reshaped the show heavily, cutting characters and songs and adding new ones. These are the main changes.

Stage

Broadway musical (1966)

Screen

Cabaret (1972), directed by Bob Fosse

1. Nearly every song stays inside the Kit Kat Klub

On stage, characters sing their feelings in the boarding house as well as in the club, in songs like "Why Should I Wake Up?" and "So What?" Fosse kept almost all of the music on the Kit Kat Klub stage, as acts that comment on the story. The one exception is "Tomorrow Belongs to Me," sung in an open-air beer garden.

2. The Schneider and Schultz romance is cut

The stage show's second couple, the landlady Fräulein Schneider and the Jewish fruit seller Herr Schultz, whose engagement ends as Nazi violence grows, are gone from the film's story. Schneider survives only as a minor landlady, and Herr Schultz does not appear. Their songs go too: "So What?," "It Couldn't Please Me More," "Meeskite," and "What Would You Do?" "Married" is heard only in the background, on a parlor piano and on a German-language record.

3. Max, Fritz, and Natalia are added

The film brings in characters drawn from Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and the play I Am a Camera: Baron Maximilian von Heune, a rich playboy who seduces both Sally and Brian, and Fritz Wendel and Natalia Landauer, a couple whose romance shows the growing danger for Jews in Berlin. None of them appear in the stage musical.

4. Cliff becomes Brian, and Sally becomes American

The stage show's American writer Cliff Bradshaw becomes Brian Roberts, a bisexual Englishman played by Michael York. Sally Bowles, English on stage, becomes an American in Liza Minnelli's performance, which won her the Academy Award for Best Actress.

5. New songs: "Mein Herr," "Money, Money," "Maybe This Time"

John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote "Mein Herr" to replace Sally's "Don't Tell Mama" and "Money, Money" to replace "The Money Song." Minnelli also sings "Maybe This Time," an earlier Kander and Ebb song she had recorded in 1964. Later stage revivals, including the 1998 Broadway production, added all three to the show.

6. "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in a beer garden

On stage the song is first sung in the club and later reprised at Schneider and Schultz's engagement party with open Nazi menace. In the film, a blond teenager sings it in a country beer garden; the camera reveals his Hitler Youth uniform, and the crowd rises to join in, turning it into an anthem.

7. A sharper "If You Could See Her"

The Emcee's song about his gorilla girlfriend was written to end with the line that she "wouldn't look Jewish at all." During the 1966 tryout, Hal Prince changed it to a gentler "meeskite" line after complaints, while the film restores the original, making the number's antisemitic sting plain.

8. A different ending

The stage show ends with Cliff leaving Berlin by train while Sally stays behind, and the Emcee leads a dark return of "Willkommen." The film also ends with the hero leaving and Sally staying, but its final image is the Kit Kat Klub audience seen in a warped mirror, with Nazi uniforms now in the crowd.

Cabaret movie vs musical: FAQs