On Sale: Oct 6, 2026
Page Count: 320 pages
Publisher: Da Capo
ISBN-13: 9780306836282

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The untold stories of the real, extraordinary people who inspired the iconic Cabaret and the vibrant, groundbreaking Bohemia that existed in 1930s Berlin

The timeless Broadway musical Cabaret won eight Tony Awards, and the 1972 film adaptation holds the record for most Oscar wins without a Best Picture trophy. While most fans know that the show is based on Christopher Isherwood’s book Berlin Stories, few realize that all of the characters—from the Emcee, to landlady Fraulein Schneider, to the immortal, flighty, fantastical Sally Bowles, whose escapades in 1930s Weimar Berlin have earned scorn and praise for generations—are based on real, extraordinary people.

In a novelistic style that captures the vibrant, groundbreaking Bohemia of Berlin in the 30s, Life is a Cabaret is a group biography of these enigmatic and provocative muses. Thanks to exhaustive research, film critic and investigative reporter Brian Fairbanks recounts the weird and wondrous lives of Jean Ross (a press agent for Joseph Stalin), John Blomshield (a drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway), Gerald Hamilton (a gay, pacifist conman), and all of the others immortalized in the iconic, eternal Cabaret. Fiction finally becomes reality as we are made privy to the secret, engaging, belief-defying details of these people and the word they inhabited—a world with illuminating, and at times disturbing, parallels to the one we live in today.

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Brian Fairbanks was an investigative reporter at Gawker and the Consumerist. He has also written for the Guardian, Business Insider, the New York Observer, Nerve, and many more outlets, and is the author of Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right and Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever.

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Brian Fairbanks

About the Author

Brian Fairbanks was an investigative reporter at Gawker and the Consumerist. He has also written for the Guardian, Business Insider, the New York Observer, Nerve, and many more outlets, and is the author of Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right and Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever.

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