The tenor Douglas McDonnell sang two songs from Speakeasy at last weekend’s Lower East Side festival at the Theater for the New City: “Dance into the Light” and “All You Are”. Unfortunately technical difficulties got in the way of recording “All You Are”, but Douglas’ rendition of “Dance into the Light” can be heard below. Jonathan Fox Powers provided the accompaniment:
*Originally posted May 14, 2015:
I walked out of the Film Forum mind abuzz and guts churning. I was chewing on a whole lot of food for thought as well as the ice cream melt I bought to soothe my emotion roiled innards. I’d just seen “Forbidden Films”, the documentary about Nazi propaganda movies that are still deemed too toxic to release unrestricted to general audiences. The Film Forum in Manhattan is showing it this week*, and most unusually you can see it free of charge. However, like me, you may purchase comfort food at their in-house bakery afterward.
I don’t know what is more awful: the horrific Nazi propaganda – anti-semitic, anti-Polish, anti-English etc. – writ large in the scenes I saw, or the artistry with which they were made. Truly awful in both senses at times. I will not soon forget the beautifully lit, beautifully acted scene of the tear-stained girl giving a heartfelt plea for living in a German village surrounded only by Germans, not having to listen to Yiddish or Polish anymore. Awful. But cinematically as beautifully made as Ingrid Bergman crying in Casablanca.
I should not describe more. It gets worse, much worse. And these scenes are best viewed in the context of this documentary, which delves deeply into the debate of why these movies remain forbidden, only occasionally allowed to be seen within the context of a curated screening. Experts and audiences and ex-Neo-Nazis (who had engaged in an underground market of these films) in Germany, France and Israel react to and debate the wisdom of keeping these films restricted or allowing them to be more widely seen and discussed. People on all sides of the issue make compelling arguments. If you don’t see “Forbidden Films”, I recommend reading the New York Times article on the subject and its review of the documentary.
1200 movies were made under the Nazi regime. Only 40 are still “forbidden”. I remember growing up in Berlin seeing several German movies made between 1933-1945. For example “Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war” (The Man who was Sherlock Holmes) and “Die Feuerzangenbowle” (The Fire Tongs Bowl), two hugely popular Heinz Rühman comedies that don’t appear to have any objectionable propaganda content (in fact “Die Feuerzangenbowle” was almost forbidden by the Nazis because an official thought all the tomfoolery the schoolboys engage in was too disrespectful of authority). Yet my strongest memory of “Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war” is the moment a German boy’s stamp expertise is what allows the movie’s (fake) Sherlock Holmes to solve the case. Why was that plot twist added in a film that otherwise had nothing to do with Germany? And I still remember with discomfort the moment when the “cool” teacher, the only adult in “Die Feuerzangenbowle” who is sympathetic, gives a speech at the end of the movie about how best to mold the minds and character of young men, a moment that raised mental alarm bells when I saw this film at sixteen with my friends at a sold out screening at the Waldbühne Amphitheater. Even in movies designed as non-political escapism, the tenor and prejudice of the time and place of their making would creep in.
“YOU DAMN KIDS, GET OFF MY SYMPHONY!”
Let’s have some fun with Beethoven! Specifically the 1st movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, easily the most famous piece of classical music in the world. The indelible Duh Duh Duh DAH motif that opens and shapes the movement may or may not be “Fate Knocking on the Door” (according to Wikipedia attribution of that metaphor to the Maestro himself is dubious), but it is surely one of the most widely recognized musical themes in existence, likely only rivaled by that other super famous Beethoven tune, the Ode to Joy.
Before we have our fun, and take a gander at how contemporary artists have joyfully appropriated this classic, let’s play Ludwig some respect and give the original a look and listen:
Premiered in 1808, Beethoven’s Fifth was soon recognized as a masterpiece and has been one of the most widely played orchestral pieces ever since. But after about 150 years of exalted safety, pop music attacked and appropriations ensued with the Rock Era. Chuck Berry famously sang “Roll Over Beethoven” (not Roll Over Mozart or Roll Over Tchaikovsky) and when ELO covered that song they included a 30 second intro quoting the famous beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth. The Japanese rock band Takeshi Terauchi & the Bunnys recorded a “surf’s up” style electric guitar instrumental of the Fifth in 1967. If Beethoven could hear it, he probably would be rolling over repeatedly in his grave.
Art New York was a huge showcase of artists at Manhattan’s Pier 55 this past weekend. Here are some photographic impressions from my visit (with the artist name given above their artwork).
And to add a little musical fun, I will include tracks of “art” songs, by which I mean songs that have something to do with “art”, either by subject and/or title or … well, listen for yourself and see how quickly you can guess the song after clicking play.
“art” song #1
Yuina Wad:
Isabelle van Zeijl:
Peter Anton:
“art” song #2
Roberto Fabel:
Seo Young-Deok:
Today I repost one of my first and still most popular “teaching artist” posts, featuring the Pre-K standard “We’re Singing” (well, standard in my Pre-K curriculum). This year’s Pre-K classes at the Children’s School have taken to the tune with enthusiasm and added, as is customary, their own 3rd and 4th “things we do together”:
For Pre-K 1:
We spin or hips together – spin spin spin – spin spin spin (like working a hula hoop)
We shake our heads together – shake shake shake – shake shake shake
For Pre-K 2:
We swing our arms together – swing swing swing – swing swing swing
We shake our heads together – shake shake shake – shake shake shake
Yes, both classes chose shaking their heads for the fourth action (“shake our heads” has been the most commonly chosen action over the years). However, as it turns out, this was not a matter of simple coincidental duplication; there are important distinctions: Pre-K 1 chose to shake their heads “yes”, and Pre-K 2 chose to shake their heads “no”.
Just wait till I teach them The Beatles’ “Hello Goodbye”:
I say yes
You say no…
I am a teaching artist. Which means that I freelance as a visiting music and drama teacher to conduct arts education projects in the classroom for limited time periods, usually 8-12 weeks, in schools all across the New York metropolitan area. With budget cuts having eliminated so many arts programs in so many schools, having a visiting teaching artist like me come in to do a theater or music project in the classroom is often the only way some students have any kind of arts education during their school year. It is not nearly enough, but it isn’t rare that that is it for the arts in some schools some years.
I have been lucky enough – in addition to the short term teaching projects most teaching artists cycle through – to have an ongoing relationship with one school, the Children’s School in Brooklyn, which has asked me to return every year for over 15 years so far to teach music and drama and create original music theater projects with their Pre-K, Kindergarten, first and fourth grade students. The school employs full time art, music and dance teachers, but it also makes resources and time available to include me in the classrooms to conduct special music and theater work.
In school I am known as Mister Danny. The children call all adults by their first name with a Miss or Mister attached at the front. Miss Margaret, Miss Sandy, Miss Beth, Mister Doug, etc. Usually Miss, especially in elementary schools, where at some sites the custodian and I might be the only male adults in the building. At the mid-sized Children’s School there are about 8 adult males in the building, which constitutes one of the higher number of male teachers I have found in one school building in NYC.
Which probably explains why there are always some kids in Pre-K and Kindergarten who will call me Miss Danny during my first sessions with them. They are not trying to sass me. They just haven’t yet realized that there is a “Mister” as well as a “Miss” that one uses when addressing the adults in the room.
My mother was leafing through the Sunday paper as she was met with a heartwarming surprise: the Free University Berlin had posted their own commemoration announcement for my father.
This is what is says:
“On March 27, 2016 passing on at 81 years of age:
Prof. Dr. Abraham Ashkenasi”
(Prof. Dr. stands for Professor Doctor, meaning my father was a university professor with a Ph.D. – these titles are taken very seriously in Germany. It was not uncommon for people to refer to my father in person as “Herr Professor Doktor”, not just in writing but also verbally, even casually. OK, back to the translation…)
“The Free University Berlin grieves over Professor Doctor Abraham Ashkenasi, who from 1965 until his retirement in 1999 was engaged in political science with a focus on politics and social sciences as a university teacher and was greatly successful representing research, education and self-determination. His far beyond the university recognized scientific expertise lay in the fields of Near-East politics, migration, minority politics and refugee movements.
The Free University loses with him an outstanding, conscientious and universally intellectually as well as humanly highly esteemed university teacher and scholar. She owes him great thanks and will hold his memory in honor.
Last August I posted a (lavishly video annotated) piece about Meryl Streep’s musical performances over the years (which you can reread below). I concluded the article with the following:
Streep’s movie musical career continues with Florence Foster Jenkins, a movie currently in production about the real life self-deluded singing heiress who performed quite horribly in Carnegie Hall. From Wikipedia: “Florence Foster Jenkins (July 19, 1868 – November 26, 1944) was an American socialite and amateur operatic soprano, who was known and ridiculed for her lack of rhythm, pitch, and tone; her aberrant pronunciation; and her generally poor singing ability.” I can’t wait to hear Meryl Streep tackle that. She’s going to be so good singing that bad!
And if the the early reviews are any indication, La Streep is once again “so good”. Florence Foster Jenkins opens May 6 in the UK, and the British critics are praising the film as very enjoyable, well-made, with two excellent star performances in Streep and Hugh Grant.
Here some review excerpts, with special focus on Streep’s performance:
From the Guardian:
“Streep is note-perfect as a deluded diva. Stephen Frears’s enjoyable, sentimental biopic gives Streep a role to relish, while Hugh Grant provides a touching foil in a genuine paean to mediocrity.”
From the Telegraph:
“Meryl Streep shines in Stephen Frears’ finger-tingling comedy. It’s pure Streep Soufflé – free from the weighty responsibility to imitate or emote the house down, she gives her most human performance since It’s Complicated, full of warmth that gives way to heart-pinching pathos.”
From Variety:
“Streep certainly has a ball mimicking the scarcely human strangulations of Jenkins’ vocal technique, though her characterization skates graciously shy of belittling burlesque: There’s an empathetic ardor for performance at work here, one that deftly coaxes even bewildered viewers into her corner.”
From Empire:
“Streep is tremendous as the jolly, optimistic Florence, whose tragic backstory is exposed in moving scenes with Grant (it’s his best performance in years). But Frears never pauses too long on the sad stuff: Florence Foster Jenkins is as light, jubilant, silly and celebratory as the woman herself.”
Oh, to be living in the U.K. right now, where “Florence Foster Jenkins” opens May 6. We unfortunate stateside blighters must wait until August 12 before it hits our screens!
The Italian playwright Mario Fratti, most famous for the musical “Nine”, writes about New York Theater for the Italian publication OGGI. And he included a nice little write up on Speakeasy in one of his recent articles. A copy was mailed to me. I looked for the article on line on Oggi’s Italian and U.S. websites, but couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was only produced on hard copy and not the internet.
You can read a blow up of the portion about Speakeasy below. It is in Italian, however, which I don’t speak. But I can gather, with help of Italian/English translation websites that Signore Fratti describes the basic narrative of the musical while praising all involved.
I think my favorite sentence is “Verso la fine c’e un’orgia sessuale con decine di insolite posizioni”. Which google translates as:
Towards the end there is a sexual orgy with dozens of unusual positions.
Un nuovo intrigante musical indeed!
Sunday April 3 my father’s memorial announcement was posted in the “Familienanzeige” section of the Tagesspiegel newspaper in Berlin. Actually there were two announcements, the one my family arranged, and another purchased by close Berlin friends of Dad’s. It was awfully touching of them to have added their own special “Traueranzeige” from friends to be placed next to the traditional family announcement.
These German friends of my fathers, who in most cases had known him since the 1960’s, knew my father as Ah-brah-hamm, the German pronunciation of Abraham, but most usually called him by the American shortening of Abraham, “Abe”.
So while the family announcement referenced Dad’s childhood Yiddish/Hebrew nickname of “Avi”, the friends’ announcement referenced “Abe”.
Well, not quite.
A closer look quickly revealed to me that my father’s German friends never discovered the correct spelling of Abe. And so in the announcement they call him “Ab”.
Ab.
Which is unfortunate, since in neither English nor German would one look at “Ab” and pronounce it “Abe”.
Had my father become a stomach muscle?
Germans don’t use “silent e”. To write out “Abe” in a way that would make a German pronounce the name correctly, you would have to spell it “Eyb”. That would have looked very odd in the announcement.
“Ab” in German is pronounced “op” or “app”, to spell it out for an English reader.
Black Ops. Special Funeral Forces. The Funeral App. For smart phone internment.
Yet my first thoughts upon seeing this were not how this would look to an American, but how it comes across in German.
Because, you see, “ab” in German means “off”. And is used commonly as a preposition.
As in “abgehoben”. Which was the first word that entered my mind when I saw my father referred to as “Ab”.
Ab – gehoben. Literally lifted off, floating off. But generally used colloquially as far out, as in wild and crazy.
My plane was delayed by two and a half hours. Needing only hand luggage for a five day stay I breezed past the baggage carousel at Berlin-Tegel, but the taxi ride added to the delay due to traffic jams on the AVUS highway. The taxi drove through the city streets instead, which allowed me to take in all that familiar Berlin architecture looking homely inviting in the unseasonably bright and warm sunshine. It had been gray and rainy all week, but now skies were clear blue, the taxi driver informed me.
Arriving so much later than expected I had only a few minutes in my childhood home before Mom and I had to get into her car and drive down south to Stahnsdorf to make our appointment. We were supposed to be there at 11am, and it was 11:45am already. Mom had called ahead to give notice of our delay, but she was worried, because under regular circumstances they don’t schedule these appointments past noon.
The Stahnsdorf grave site of F. W. Murnau, the director of silent movie classics like “Nosferatu” and “Sunrise”
Ruhestätte Stahnsdorf is a fifteen minute drive from our home, south of Berlin just a stone’s throw away on the “other” side of where the Wall used to be. When I was growing up, Zehlendorf and Wannsee were on “our” side, the “Western” side of the Wall, and just south were Teltow and Stahnsdorf, on the “Eastern” side. Unreachable. I knew of Teltow, because the avenue Teltower Damm, as its name indicated, went south past my school towards Teltow, but was thwarted from reaching the town by those infamous Cold War concrete barriers, with sand strip, barbed wire and heavily armed border patrols just behind.
The grave of illustrator Heinrich Zille
There was no Stahnsdorfer Straße I knew about, so the town of Stahnsdorf remained out of my consciousness for most of my childhood. Until the early 1980’s that is, when a bus route was extended to reach into those two city blocks within Stahnsdorf that somehow managed to have been incorporated into the Berlin city limits in the 1920’s, and thus wound up in the American District after the fall of the Third Reich, becoming part of West Berlin when Germany divided into two. These two narrow city blocks reached like an amoeba’s branchlike offshoot into DDR territory, surrounded on three sides by the Wall and at one point as narrow as a single street. The few inhabitants there felt cut off and neglected by the city. So in the 1980s, perhaps more for reasons of politics than infrastructure, it was decided to extend the busline that serviced Wannsee into that sliver of “free” Stahnsdorf. Which is how I learned the name of the town; when one of the buslines that passed our local stop announced their new “Endstation”: Stahnsdorf.
Endstation Stahnsdorf. Terminal Stahnsdorf.
“Graveyardsection for Internment under Trees”
I have not yet written much about my parents on this blog so far, but this piece from last June includes one of my favorite anecdotes about my father:
“My parents were always supportive of all my creative endeavors, but that weekend my father reacted differently. He didn’t just praise and support my work, he very seriously declared that I was a real composer. I practically laughed at him. I said I am just a kid messing about, I’m not a real composer. My father rather heatedly insisted that no, this stuff is really good, and I am a real composer. I rather noisily asserted my amateur teenager status. Traditionally these kinds of arguments between parents and children go the other way around. The child expresses his need to be an artist while the parent tells him to stop dreaming and pursue a sensible vocation. It amuses me greatly to remember this conversation as my father yelling ”You are a composer” and me responding ”No, Dad, I’m just a kid messing about.” ”
It was Friday, April 23, 1982. I was fourteen, one month shy of my fifteenth birthday. I remember the day and the events that sealed my fate very clearly (although admittedly I had to dig up the old journal I’d kept then to look up the exact date). Whether it was an epiphany, or a choice, or simply one turn of events that set others into motion, what happened that day would mark me as a composer for life. I would not fully acknowledge that fact, undeniably embrace my fate so to speak, for another three years. But it is clear that from April 23, 1982 on, whether I wished to or not, I was a composer.
Up until then if you asked me “what I would be when I grow up” I would have said “actor” (and maybe occasionally added “director”). From as long as I could remember I loved performing and would do so unselfconsciously at any occasion that presented itself or just freely about the house (to my brother’s annoyance). It is probably in my genes. My mother is an opera singer and her mother was a singer and actress during her youth in Finland in the 1920’s. My mother has told me that the way I express myself on stage reminds her forcefully of old stage photos of my Finnish grandmother. So I was likely created a performer, Born That Way to misquote Lady Gaga (although I guess I am also Born That Way in the other sense). Except for one strange inexplicable lapse in Kindergarten when I told my teacher I wanted to be a doctor (still can’t fathom why after all these years) I always knew I wanted to be an actor.
Being a composer was not a particular ambition. I loved all the arts. As a kid I would engage in all varieties of creative pursuits, and although I did compose a couple of tunes for a make-believe musical version of Robin Hood when I was eleven, I spent many more childhood playtime hours building hand puppets and marionettes or drawing cartoons or writing short stories. If I had any serious artistic ambitions outside of performing it was for writing children’s stories, some of which I unsuccessfully tried to get published. The children’s book publisher who rejected my children’s book “Das Goldene Ei” – The Golden Egg – (with illustrations by my Mom) asserted in her rejection letter that books had to be at least a hundred pages long to be published (a ridiculous assertion, considering there is a whole class of children’s picture books that are much shorter). After I received that rejection I took it upon myself to write a children’s book of at least one hundred pages. This book, “Es war einmal ein Frosch”, begun when I was eleven, would turn me into a composer three years later.
When I was in 9th grade, my music teacher Steven Hepner ran a composing lunch club. I was a kid who just in general loved to be creative no matter the medium, and I had had nine years of piano lessons, so I composed something for the piano. Over many months I would bring Mr. Hepner a piano piece to which I added a couple measures every week. Eventually I found a way to give the piece an ending. But then I needed to bring in something else to the lunch club.
There was this snaky little melody I had come up with on the piano while my left hand was picking a simple pattern on some black keys. A phrase that first snaked down to hit an unexpected minor note and repeated to land on the major note one had first expected. Then the tune did a little more soaring, finding one more unexpected, almost dissonant harmony before ending on a major third. A little more playing around with the tune yielded a counter melody and a solemn fanfare of a coda. (Of course at the time I didn’t have the wherewithal to describe what I’d created in these terms.)
Two measures from “Love Theme – The Comet”
I wrote down the notes as best I could (in those days I hadn’t yet quite grasped the rule about note stems going down left of the note and going up right of the note and where on the staff one made the switch). I played the piece for Mr. Hepner at the next lunch club meeting. I also sang a set of lyrics I had written to go with the tune:
WHEN THE COMET SPRAYS ITS LIGHT ABOVE
WHEN ITS SPARKLE FILLS US WITH LOVE
THEN I’LL COME FROM DOWN THE MILKY WAY
HERE TO STAY
WITH YOU
Mr. Hepner found the nature of the lyrics rather curious. What is this about a comet and coming down from the Milky Way? I explained that I had been writing a children’s book in German called “Es war einmal ein Frosch”, which was a riff on the Frog Prince fairy tale, but in my story Prince Charming is really an extra-terrestrial who is accidentally transformed into a frog when he is beamed down onto the planet. He manages to make contact with Princess Marianne, who is desperate not to be forced into a marriage with the neighboring kingdom’s Prince Waldemar, a union negotiated as part of a peace treaty. She ends up kissing one frog after another to find and elope with the extra-terrestrial whom she sees as her Prince Charming. This tune would be his love song to her. His space man persona explains the nature of the lyrics.
Mr. Hepner asked me “Why the Frog Prince”? I told him when I was younger I’d think about what fairy tales Walt Disney hadn’t yet turned into animated musicals (remember this was decades before “The Princess and the Frog”) and I came up with the Frog Prince, and decided to write the story as a children’s book. Then Mr. Hepner said four fateful words: “So write a musical.”
“What?”
“You just said you first thought of the story as a musical. Well, now you wrote a song for that story. So turn it into a musical.”
I thought it was a crazy suggestion. It was one thing to write one little song – not even a full song with verses and chorus, just a short tune with a simple set of lyrics – it was a whole other thing to write a musical. I couldn’t do that!
Yesterday Kelly Aliano and I got together to put together the mailing of Speakeasy Reward gifts (T-Shirts and Booklets and Posters, oh my!) to those Kickstarter contributors to the showcase production of Speakeasy who weren’t able to pick up their rewards at a performance during our run at the Theater for the New City. The massive mailing included packages addressed to locations as close as Manhattan and as far as Australia.
Thank you again to all who contributed to making the showcase production of Speakeasy a reality!
Kelly addressing envelopes
Danny stuffing envelopes
Time for another Notes from a Composer rerun, or repost, this time a double feature from last April on the convention of breaking into song in musicals, and how cleverly the movie version of Cabaret subverted that convention. This post will be followed by another on how I address this convention in my musical Speakeasy.
When people who say they hate musicals explain why they hate musicals they usually fall back on this well-worn reason: it is unrealistic that characters just break into song and dance; this doesn’t happen in “real life”. I find this a rather eye-rollingly lazy reason to reject musicals as an art form. Do we reject comedies because in real life people generally don’t engage in hilarious dialog and pratfalls? Do we reject action films because in real life all those extreme stunts just don’t keep occurring like that? Do we reject horror films because there is just no such thing as zombies and mummies and vampires (never mind that they are a reflection of our subconscious desires just as much as a song is in a musical). If you hate jokes, fine, reject comedies. If you don’t want to watch violence, fine, reject action films (like my mother-in-law does). If you hate being scared, for heaven’s sake, avoid horror movies. And if you don’t like music, avoid musicals. But if you do like music (and really, most everybody does), it doesn’t make sense to reject all musicals just because people sing in them. People breaking into song in musicals is as much a suspend-your-disbelief integral element as all the other suspend-your-disbelief elements we accept to enjoy genres of art, or even the basic tools of the language of cinema, like editing, lighting or musical scoring. Or as one blog post I found that goes into great detail defining various musical tropes puts it: “Musicals have songs in them – just go with it.”
That said (or vented), there is at least one musical that most stringently circumvents the “characters breaking in to song” trope. Cabaret is chock-full of brilliantly realized musical numbers, but all of them are performed “realistically” within the context of a performance actually happening as naturally as any other interaction between characters in the real world. If you absolutely must avoid suspending your disbelief at seeing “characters break into song” when “in real life” they wouldn’t, couldn’t ever do that, then I invite you to watch the movie adaptation of Cabaret. It also just happens to be one of the greatest musicals (or movies) ever made.
The stage version of Cabaret, a big hit on Broadway in 1966, was a traditional musical where characters would burst into song. It also included scenes in the Kit Kat Club, a seedy Weimar Berlin cabaret, where the creepy Master of Ceremonies (played by Joel Grey on stage as well as on screen), the Kit Kat Girls and Sally Bowles (played by Liza Minnelli in the movie) would perform numbers that would comment on the musical’s narrative. These numbers were therefore not suspend-your-disbelief moments of characters breaking into song unrealistically, but real life performances at the Kit Kat Club, which was as much a real setting of the musical as the boarding house where Sally resided.
When Cabaret was adapted for the screen in 1972, the producer Cy Feuer, the director Bob Fosse and the screen writer Jay Presson Allen agreed to cut all the “character breaking into song” numbers. Every musical number would almost exclusively be performed in the Kit Kat Club, as an actual performance that could be witnessed by the cabaret’s audience. Some popular melodies from the stage version would be either cut or heard through other realistic means, as when Sally puts on the phonograph to play an instrumental version of “It Couldn’t Please Me More” to dance seductively for Brian, or when “Married” is heard sung in German as “Heirat”, also on the phonograph, while Sally and Brian are planning their future life together.
Additional songs not heard on Broadway were introduced to the movie version, like “Mein Herr”, “Money Money”, and “Maybe This Time”, all of them now so popular that the recent stage revivals of Cabaret are a hybrid of both the original stage version and the movie, incorporating these songs.
With almost every musical number being a performance at the Kit Kat Club, the notion of these numbers acting as sly commentary on the narrative, pioneered in the stage version of Cabaret, became even more pronounced. “Willkommen” not only introduces you to the denizens of the Kit Kat Club, but also shows Brian (Michael York) arriving in Berlin. While the introduction of Sally Bowles and her sexual history is deftly handled with the cynical “Mein Herr” number, when she and Brian transition from friends to lovers Sally is shown sensually back-lit singing “Maybe This Time” at the club, intercut with moments of romantic bliss between the couple. When Sally meets the filthy rich Maximilian, the movie segues to her and The M.C. performing the famous “Money, Money” number.
Sally and Brian’s evolving relationship with Maximilian occasions the M.C. touting the advantages of threesomes in “Two Ladies”. Fritz confessing his love for the Jewish heiress Natalia, as well as his own secret Jewish identity results in the M.C. soft-shoeing with a Gorilla in a tutu, singing “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes”.
The one musical number sung in full not at the Kit Kat Club (and not playing on the phonograph) would be the masterfully chilling “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”, sung live at a beer garden in the German countryside, as realistically as any performance on an outdoor stage might be.
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Notes from a Composer 