Life is a Cabaret Book Signing

-The Garden District Book Shop is thrilled to announce that on November 3 local writer and author Brian Fairbanks will be returning to the shop to celebrate his book Life is a Cabaret: The Amazing Story of the Real Lives that Inspired the Iconic Musical.

Just in time for the show’s 60th anniversary, Life is a Cabaret tells the untold story of the extraordinary people who inspired Christopher Isherwood's characters in Cabaret, the landmark Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film, and the vibrant Bohemia that escaped from Berlin or endured under the Nazi regime.

The festivities will begin at 6:00 PM. There will be live music from Ingrid Lucia and special guests, cocktail specials at Bar epilogue, author reading and more. The event is free and open to the public but interested parties are encouraged to RSVP ahead of time on Eventbrite.

Life is a Cabaret

Even diehard fans of Cabaret remain unaware that Isherwood's Berlin Stories, celebrated as one of the best novels of the 20th Century, is based on a true story―and real people, from the larger-than-life landlady to the immortal, flighty, fantastical Sally Bowles, whose escapades in 1930s Weimar Berlin were comically exaggerated in one of the most memorable characters in Broadway history.

In a novelistic style that captures the joyful art-making and wild final parties of a democratic Germany before Hitler, Life is a Cabaret is a group biography of these enigmatic and provocative muses. Thanks to exhaustive research, investigative reporter Brian Fairbanks recounts the weird and wondrous lives of Jean Ross (the real Sally, a brilliant writer, free-loving film critic secretly working for Stalin's communists), Wilfrid Israel (who saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler), Gerald Hamilton (a gay conman with questionable Nazi ties), and all of the others immortalized in the iconic, eternal Berlin Stories. Fairbanks unearths belief-defying details of survival, tragedy, sex, and brilliant art from these people and the world they inhabited―a world with illuminating, and at times disturbing, parallels to the one we live in today.