‘Cabaret Verboten’

As the daughter of composer Friedrich Hollander, whose songs are in both “Cabaret Verboten” and “Frauleins in Underwear,” I strongly disagree with Sylvie Drake’s review (“German Cabaret, American Attitude,” Aug. 10).

I attended opening night of “Cabaret Verboten” with my father’s second wife, Hedi Schoop, who was a featured performer in his Berlin Tingle Tangle Theatre from 1929 to 1933, and we were both very enthusiastic about the production.

Drake calls “Cabaret Verboten” laid-back and shapeless, yet I found it to be just the opposite. Like the Nazi machine’s own measured and insidious advance, Jeremy Lawrence’s adept directing, brilliant English lyrics and carefully planned progression of songs was not only historically correct but so was his subtlety in building tension.

Drake also bemoans the show’s lack of decadence and degeneracy. My father’s work was neither degenerate nor decadent. It was playful, provocative and full of sexual innuendo. His songs were powerful, not because they were “dripping in decadence and menace” but because they playfully tease the “decadent” male chauvinists in the audience and ironically expose the bourgeois morality of the time.

“Decadent and degenerate” were Hitler’s terms to describe whatever he found objectionable in the art of the period. Neither adjective has anything to do with the art, per se, and to use either does art a gross disservice.

Lyrics like “The Jews Are All to Blame” are the reason my father barely escaped Germany alive. Perhaps Drake doesn’t find these and other lyrics “menacing” enough, but the Nazis certainly did.

MELODIE HOLLANDER

Los Angeles