Win when you're singing

How Cabaret hooked people who hate musicals

Don't you hate adaptations? Second-hand and more than usually second-rate, like the sequel they're rarely the equal. Take Cabaret (1972), which began life as a hit Broadway musical... except that wasn't the beginning either. Prior to that, it existed as John Van Druten's play (and wretched film) I Am a Camera (which earned the great Dorothy Parker review: 'Me no Leica'), which in turn were adaptations of the Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, which were based on his own life.

With that genealogy, you would think the ideas must have been diluted down the years. However, Bob Fosse and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen ransacked all the versions and created the most potent brew yet. Their film never remotely resembles a remake, it feels original, so much so that although the Best Picture Oscar of 1973 went to The Godfather, Cabaret cleaned up in eight prime categories, including director, screenplay, cinematography, actress and supporting actor, and the film recouped its investment five-fold within months of its release.

Back then, musicals were already low on filmgoers' lists, so how come it was such a success? Simple: Cabaret is the musical for people who hate them. Given the vibrancy of its now iconic numbers - Liza Minnelli in bowler and black suspenders astride a bentwood chair belting out 'Mein Herr' or shimmying and shivering with pleasure over 'Money' with Joel Grey - it sounds strange to say it but one of the chief reasons why Cabaret is so popular is that it's not shot like a musical.

Cinemagoers have long been split between those who love or loathe the form. The latter, it seems, cannot cope with the abandonment of 'realism', which means that regardless of who or where characters are, they can burst into song. Fosse's great trick was to turn all that on its head. A few years after the film was released, he said: 'I get antsy watching musicals in which people are singing as they walk down the street or hang out the laundry ... in fact I think it looks a little silly.'

That's pretty disingenuous from someone whose directing career began with the numbers in The Pajama Game and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. His first solo directing credit was Sweet Charity and it has his fingerprints all over it - a restless camera, steep shooting angles, a reliance on cross-cutting - but the mix was too self-conscious and it bombed. For the next three years in Hollywood he couldn't get arrested. But with Cabaret he hit upon a winning style in stark contrast to musicals' 'non-realistic' tone.

Cabaret's audiences never have to make allowances for singing, because the songs appear entirely 'natural': they're all site-specific, every number performed by a performer within the Kit Kat Club. (The single exception is the anthem 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me', but that too is set up naturalistically, as the Aryan youth starts his song a capella and the band that joins him is highly visible.)

That also partly explains why, whenever you recall the picture, Grey's master of ceremonies - a mesmerising King Leer - and Minnelli's Sally stand so proud of the texture. Everyone else seems subdued and diffuse, standing meekly by and letting the leads get on with it. Why? Because in musicals, character is defined by song and none of the characters outside the Kit Kat Club actually sing: they're not in the musical.

Fosse slung out all the plot songs from the stage show and kept or created the rest, all of which act as political, social or sexual metaphors for the characters and their dangerous but 'divinely decadent' milieu. But he doesn't just use the Kit Kat Club as a distorting music-hall-of-mirrors. He starts the songs, then cross-cuts to images outside the club - a man being beaten to death by Nazi thugs, Sally's post-coital bliss - as the songs progress, which is what gives the thrillingly chilly film its strong satirical bite. This use of music as ironic commentary - albeit far more low-key - anticipated movies such as American Graffiti where songs exist not in the mouths of characters but on the soundtrack echoing above and beneath the action.

Ironically, Cabaret 's slavish 'anti-musical' realism may have sealed the the modern musical's fate. Studios took one look at the profits and decided that the fantasy-driven tradition was dead.

Three decades later, Moulin Rouge is supposed to be spearheading a revival but for all its visceral visual splendours, that film is so terrified of letting you spot that the characters are actually singing that the whole thing becomes one protracted (over-edited) music video, thus robbing you of the musical's unique lift from speech into song.

In fact, in the intervening years the musical didn't die. Disney kept the form alive with boffo box-office - but then no one expects realism from cartoon characters. Face it, animation means never having to say you're singing.

· Cabaret is re-released on Friday