Fran Magazine: Issue #101

A surprise Maestro moment, the May book club announcement, and Phil weighs in on Cabaret

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). The way this works is that Wednesday (regular) issues are free for all and Sunday (dispatch) and reread diary issues are for paid subscribers only. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine, and feel free to follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd.

Maestro moment

Rare Maestro moment NOT about Bradley Cooper: Fran Magazine person of interest Klaus Mäkelä, the Zillennial conductor, is taking over the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2027. When I saw him back in 2022 conducting at the New York Philharmonic, I was compelled and curious — maybe not omg wowed, but definitely enjoyed — and based on the response he got from what I would politely refer to as “the usual symphony demographic,” I thought, “they are going to try to make this guy really HAPPEN in America.” Well, he’s happening!

May book club announcement

Okay… happy April 3rd… I am here to announce the May book club selection. If you recall this time last year, May at Fran Magazine was “Middlemarch May,” and we all read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which was yay. I’m pleased to announce that this year’s selection for the May book is…

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everyone say THANK YOU PHIL for the custom graphic

We are going to read Mervyn Peake’s (his real name… I googled) novel Titus Groan, which is both the first in a series but also a standalone novel. Yay!!!!!!

Titus Groan is a “fantasy of manners,” a genre selection, yes, but a pretty light foray into fantasy, that’s full of court intrigue and crazy names. A brief paging through the book a month or so ago had me chuckling at all the crazy names. Titus Groan is also notably much shorter than Middlemarch by about half, which will make for a more manageable reading schedule that doesn’t have people doing 200 pages a week.

Mervyn May will “start” on May 1st, with bonus discussion posts on May 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. Mervyn May posts will also be free for everyone, and you can read at your own pace. Plenty of that happened last year and I don’t think anything got ruined for anyone. I’ll figure out how to divide up the book once we get closer, but if you wanna get ahead of things and snag your copy¹ prior to May, get on it!

A conversation about Bob Fosse and Cabaret convo with my roommate Phil

I mentioned this in the Sunday Dispatch, but Phil has been going through a pretty significant Bob Fosse phase, watching old clips of various Fosse-directed and choreographed performances. I’ve probably heard Mein Herr in some variation every day for the past two weeks. At the request of a few Fran Magazine readers, I had a conversation with Phil about his ongoing acute case of Fosse fever.

Hi Phil. For the past couple of weeks, you’ve been in the throes of something you call “Fosse fever.” Can you tell the readers a little about how this all started?

It’s been a slow build that began with the tragic death of Chita Rivera and the outpouring of love and and clips on Twitter of her doing “her thing.” You were scrolling while we were in bed and you put on the “Big Spender” sequence from Fosse’s Sweet Charity. I was rapt!! How could you not be. Prior to seeing it, I had always considered musical theater to be something that didn’t really click with me beyond Sondheim. I had seen Cabaret and All That Jazz in high school, and remember being like, “woah cool, they’re kinda dark!” but didn’t leave much of an impression beyond that. I really don’t like what I’d call “Corny Belter” stuff, which is what most musical theater today seems to be— maudlin stories, maudlin songs… BORING!!!

I get that but let me just say that you would have loved “sexy Oklahoma!” from a few years back…

Maybe!! I have a vague memory of watching (and liking) Oklahoma! on VHS when I was like, five years old. I have no idea what it’s about, though I presume it’s maybe a sort of, “And Starring The State Of Oklahoma As Herself” kind of deal.

Anyway, sorry — back to Fosse. You then watched all of Sweet Charity on a plane? I’ve never seen it in full.

The “Big Spender” sequence really did a number on me. It’s sick, sinister, sexy and hideous all at once. People talk, rightly, about that insane shit Chita does with her hand behind the back and on the opposite hip, it’s insane! There’s so much more being said with the choreography there, with the disconnect between what their bodies are doing and what their faces are saying. I simply had to see it in context, so I p*rated it with the intention of us watching it together, but there I was on a four hour plane ride with those dinky-dim-dogshit touch screens from the stone age, and I thought hey, why not watch this long ass movie I have ready to go!

The way I’m learning in real time that you have this movie on your computer and that it wasn’t just available to watch on the plane… and that I could have seen it at any time over the past two weeks but didn’t know it was available to me…

Out of respect for your readership I won’t say “I told you I did this and you forgot,” but instead, sorry.

Thank you!

Anyways, I was really floored by it! The dancing is the real star — reader, watch “The Rich Man’s Frug,” right now — but Fosse is able to inject a real sense of grime and pessimism into the musical theater of it all.

The film is sort of cruel to Charity, who really is so, so sweet, and kind of annoying, in a way that reminded me of Elaine May’s comedic works. Her and Fosse feel like kindred spirits in their ability to conjure genuine evil out of late ‘60s Hollywood aesthetics.

From there I’m aware that you’ve rewatched Cabaret a handful of times over the past ten or so days, and you’ve listened to a few different versions of the soundtrack from various revivals and one-offs. What do you think clicked about it for you this time that didn’t when you were in high school?

The biggest difference I think is a deeper understanding of the cultural and political situation of Weimar Germany, the material factors that gave rise to the Third Reich, as well as what came after. Fran Mag is, I think, mostly a “feel good” publication, so I won’t dive too deep into what I call the “postwar Nazi international,” but seeing Fosse use musical numbers and dance to lay bare the hideous bones of the beasts that profit from and enable fascism, without sacrificing the inherent joy of Liza Minelli doing bona-fide superstar shit, is just an unreal cinematic achievement. I can’t get enough!!

Every time I watch I pick up on new stuff. For example: despite the swastika having more and more of a visual presence in the film, Liza’s Sally is only on screen with one twice, and both times Fosse takes great pains to ensure that she and the symbol never physically cross paths, or the specific ways in which Nazism and Nazi symbolism creeps into the show at the Kit-Kat Club: During a harrowing mud-wrestling sequence at the start of the film, Joel Grey’s MC dips his finger in the mud and smears it across his lip, then does a little “sieg heil,” and the audience ROARS in laughter at this parody of the weird little man running this fringe political party. By the end, he’s pandering to the audience’s anti-semitic tendencies with “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes.” It’s really smart, layered filmmaking that shows either a great deal of research or an innate, spiritual understanding of the Weimar sickness.

To be clear, you think he frames this to avoid implicating her in the country’s growing fascist tendencies?

I think the opposite. Brian (Michael York) is constantly crossing paths with swastikas. They’re showing up at the club more and more and more, but Sally doesn’t really give a shit. She’s an American, she wants to be star! She’d sell her body and soul to be in a major motion picture, it could be directed by Leni Reifenstahl or Sergei Eisenstein, as long as it gets her name up in lights, she’ll collaborate with anyone or anything, no matter how monstrous.

I found myself thinking a lot about Zone of Interest while rewatching… not to trudge up a discourse… but both are films about the economics of fascism and the petty, corny, upwardly bourgeoisie social mobility of commonplace Nazis.

Yes! Fosse’s Cabaret carries with it the horror of everything that comes after: The Holocaust, the rise of the postwar Nazi International, “polyamory”… He uses the audience’s context against them, which makes it so sneering and ugly. The magic comes from the way he implicates you as an audience member, by making Sally so charming and lovable, by making the Kit Kat Club look like a fun (if not seedy) place to spend an evening… Fascism requires the collaboration of arts and culture, of bureaucrats who don’t care one way or the other about Jews or Slavs or Communists and just see a new and interesting opportunity to make some money. I think he nails this point without ever having someone turn to the camera and say “this is what the movie is about.”

We have have yet to see Star 80 or Lenny… and I’m sure an All That Jazz rewatch is on the horizon, but in the meantime, we are watching FX’s Fosse/Verdon, which I’d seen during the pandemic and recall liking. It’s not holding up quite as well in rewatching, but I’m curious to know if it’s shedding any light on your understanding of Fosse’s work.

Not really, mostly because I tend to get obsessive (it’s Fosse fever, not Fosse fancy after all), so between Sweet Charity and us starting Fosse/Verdon I did a lot of research into their lives, but I do really like the way the show does classic music biopic beats with such esoteric material, and it does a great job of invoking the time period and milieu in which Fosse and Verdon lived, laughed, and loved.

We sort of separately came to the same conclusion that it reminded us of Maestro. I know you’ve watched a handful of clips from various stage revivals and performances of Fosse productions. Do any of them feel more notable than others?

The Mendes revival of Cabaret is awesome. I really want to watch the pro-tape in full. There’s some old TV performances of Damn Yankees numbers with Fosse’s dance choreography that are electric, and the clips that are available of Verdon as Charity does something impossible — makes you kinda hate Shirley MacLaine! No knock on her of course, she’s an icon, a sweetie, a real star, but Verdon in that role has something that transcends star power, and makes it clear, in this era where her star power has faded some (simply as a result of the stage being a transitive, temporary thing compared to film), why the FX show is called Fosse/Verdon and not just Fosse, like the book it’s based on.

Last but not least… yesterday night we saw the new Broadway revival of Cabaret (Blythe voice “when are they not reviving Cabaret”) which was transferred from the West End, starring Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles (taking over for Jessie Buckley) and Eddie Redmayne as (I said Joker, but Caroline said he’s more Riddler, and you said Art the Clown from Terrifier) as the emcee. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about — not to be high school persuasive essay about this — its pros and cons and both come down somewhere on the side of, “it’s entertaining but misses the mark.”

It’s a great show! “Immersive” has become a major buzzword for live entertainment the last few years, but this really lives up to the term. Unfortunately, it’s afraid to do anything with that immersion. The original 1966 production of Cabaret had a big mirror above the stage, angled at 45 degrees to reflect the audience back at themselves on some subtly nightmarish Bertold Brecht type shit. This has the opportunity to go even further— it’s a boozy, decadent party atmosphere before the show even starts; I’ve never seen a stage production encourage its audience to get wasted the way this one does, but the implication (that we the audience members are Berlin Cabaret attendees who are living, laughing, and loving our way through the rise of the Nazi party, isn’t really interrogated in a meaningful sense. I get it; this is an insanely expensive production (they gutted the whole damn theater for it) and you don’t want to run the risk of pissing off the people who pay $600 a head for table seats by calling them Nazis or asking them to sieg-heil, but if you’re not gonna do that, what exactly is it that you’re doing with Cabaret as a text that warrants this kind of expensive, expansive production? It has the veneer of something revolutionary and edgy, but it’s afraid to have the “there” really be there. I could say more…

This is stretching the length of a regular Fran Magazine issue, so we can wrap it up for now. I just want it on the record that you and I both liked Eddie Redmayne’s scary emcee. I’m not sure why — given I loathe most of his films, and his performances in them on both an aesthetic and intellectual level — but I find myself rooting for the guy, and this feels like a pretty noteworthy performance of his.

When will they let us have an Eddie Method Mayne?

Okay.

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