Joe Masteroff, Playwright of ‘Cabaret’ Fame, Is Dead 98

Joe Masteroff, the playwright who won a Tony and international renown for “Cabaret,” the often-revived 1966 Broadway musical about soulless lovers lost in the decadence of a seedy Berlin nightclub and the rising fascism of prewar Germany, died Friday in Engelwood, New Jersey. He was 98.

His death, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home, was confirmed by Howard Marren, a friend and his literary executor.

The “Cabaret” of Masteroff’s vision was the Kit Kat Klub, with a lewd, androgynous master of ceremonies, sexually charged dancers, a flaming chanteuse and audiences of corrupt businessmen, drag queens and brownshirt thugs. Outside, Jews are beaten in the streets and a proud Germany sinks into moral and social decay.

Inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories” and John van Druten’s stage adaptation, “I Am a Camera,” “Cabaret,” with a book by Masteroff, music by John Kander and lyrics by Fred Ebb, was a smash hit, running 1,165 performances. It won eight Tonys, including for best musical, and was followed by a national tour, a London production, an Oscar-winning 1972 film starring Liza Minnelli, many major revivals and countless community theater productions.

A half century after the curtain first rose on Joel Grey as the master of ceremonies, singing a specious “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,” the Masteroff portrait of a nation descending into anti-Semitism and war was still being staged in New York and London, in towns across the United States and Europe, and still drawing crowds with its fair youth singing the strident “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and the alchemy that turns words and music into shattering emotions.

At a time when many Broadway musicals reflected the political and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, “Cabaret,” produced and directed by Broadway legend Harold Prince, pushed boundaries with provocative depictions of homosexuality, bisexuality, ménages à trois and abortion.

“This marionette’s-eye view of a time and place in our lives that was brassy, wanton, carefree and doomed to crumble is brilliantly conceived,” Walter Kerr wrote in a review for The New York Times. “The place is Berlin, the time is the late ‘20s, when Americans still went there and Hitler could be shrugged off as a passing noise that needn’t disturb dedicated dancers.”

With Nazi storm clouds gathering in the last days of the Weimar Republic, the Masteroff story centered on two loves destined to perish — that of Sally Bowles, the British singer at the Kit Kat, and Clifford Bradshaw, an American writer seeking inspiration in Berlin; and that of their boardinghouse landlady, Fraulein Schneider, and her Jewish suitor, Herr Schultz. There was only one swastika in the original production, on an armband worn by Clifford’s bisexual German friend, Ernst Ludwig. “The idea was that showing just one swastika onstage can be more effective than showing 100 if the timing is right,” Masteroff told The Times during a 1998 Broadway revival of “Cabaret.”

In an interview for this obituary in 2016, he recalled that there had been some trepidation by the producers over audience reactions to the lyrics for “If You Could See Her (Through My Eyes).” Serenading his dance partner, a performer in a gorilla suit, the leering Joel Grey ended with the line “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

Masteroff denied accounts that on opening night the line had been changed from “Jewish” to “meeskite,” Yiddish for ugly person. “Not true,” Masteroff said. “It was a debatable line, but really terrific. They were worried that people would be offended by it. But the audience accepted it. They applauded it and the show went on.”

Over the years, the success of “Cabaret” escalated. The 1998 production in New York ran for 2,377 performances; a London production ran from September 2006 to June 2008, then toured for two years. It was revived again on Broadway in 2014. The Las Vegas Review-Journal, reviewing a touring 2016 revival, called the show “timeless.”

Masteroff is also remembered for what was originally a modestly successful 1963 Broadway musical, “She Loves Me,” which gained traction years later in revivals. With music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, it was based on Miklos Laszlo’s 1937 play, “Parfumerie,” and the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch film based on it, “The Shop Around the Corner,” starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

“She Loves Me” was the tale of a clerk in a perfume shop in 1930s Budapest who is courting a woman by correspondence. By chance, she comes to work in the shop, although neither recognizes the other. While they are consistently at odds at work, their love flowers in their letters. The complicated turns are eventually, happily resolved.

Reviews were admiring and Masteroff was nominated for another Tony. Eclipsed by “Hello, Dolly!” in 1964, the show ran only 10 months. But it was produced in London a year later and revived on Broadway in 1993 and 2016 to rave reviews. Ben Brantley of The Times called the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2016 production “a sustained reminder of the pleasures of exalted ordinariness.”

Joseph Masteroff was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 1919, one of two children of Louis and Rose (Pogost) Masteroff. His father owned a store that sold beaded-bag kits and other do-it-yourself products. Joe and his older sister, Vera, attended Philadelphia public schools. Intending on a writing career, he majored in journalism at Temple University and graduated in 1940.

He joined the Army on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and served for three years in England, mostly doing personnel work.

From 1949 to 1951 he studied playwriting in New York at the American Theater Wing, which assisted veterans in theatrical pursuits. One prominent member of the wing was Antoinette Perry, in whose name the group’s Tony Awards are given.

Masteroff’s first Broadway play was “The Warm Peninsula,” a comedy about two women who fall for gigolos on a trip to Florida. After a national tour, it ran for 86 performances on Broadway in 1959 and 1960 with a cast that included Julie Harris, Farley Granger, June Havoc and Larry Hagman.

He wrote the libretto for a 1978 Edward Thomas folk opera based on Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” about the murder of a baby born of an affair between a farmer’s third wife and his son. He also wrote the book and lyrics for “Six Wives,” a chamber musical based on the life of Henry VIII, which ran off-Broadway in 1992.

Masteroff, who never married and leaves no immediate survivors, lived for many years in midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the Broadway theater district. He often walked in the area, passing theaters where his musicals had played. But he said he rarely attended Broadway shows anymore — except for revivals of his own musicals.