Reveal
a vocab word that needs to come at the right time.
Now this is a common vocab word, obviously, but it’s a term that gained quite a bit more importance in my own life’s usage as it’s used in burlesque. That’s the first time I heard reveal as jargon, in other words. Reveals are the center of the art of burlesque: it’s not the stripping that’s sexy, it’s not the lingerie underneath the layer, or the body curves that makes a titillating act; it’s the tension of the reveal. Not what’s underneath, but the moment just before the exposure of same. That’s why (I think) it’s called a reveal: it’s the dancer sharing something with you, the audience; revealing a secret.
All burlesque choreography is centered around the reveal: not about what comes off, but when it does. Sometimes even ‘if’ it does: one of my recent acts (danced to an old ditty called ‘My Girl’s Pussy’), didn’t even involve strippng, but me interacting with a stuffed cat, the audience, and revealing the joke within the lyrics. Another of my acts included a buildup of smaller reveals until the very final one which was a punchline of sorts to the whole thing: danced to Siouxsie’s ‘Peekaboo,’ the final reveal uncovered a pair of pasties made from giant googly eyes. If those googly eyes had come out any earlier in that song than they did, the effect would’ve been ruined.
Shaman or Real man?
I want to talk a little bit about two musicals and cultural literacy, as they pertain to the art of the reveal. But first, I want to make a brief return to shamanism.
If you’ll recall, the shaman’s job was centered around revealing what lies behind the veil between worlds. They’d use humor often (hence the deep connection of clowning to shamanism…but you gotta go read that article to get the deets on that), and they were the keepers of Story. They’d use their gift of storytelling to reveal the nature of the world, and of us people in it.
I mentioned in a recent Note here on Substack that I suspected the big stink related to many viewers’ reactions to Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee performance in the recent Cabaret revival had a lot to do with a misconception of what spooky, sacred clowns are supposed to do and be, and the directly related fear of clowns in modern day Western culture. And I think that’s true to an extent, for sure. But once I sat down and really started to pick this strange cultural conflict apart, I realized there’s another dimension to it other than that, in addition to it, and perhaps speaking to a deeper issue when it comes to our society’s ability to consume culture, let alone appreciate art. And so I then discovered, too, that there’s a direct connection between this disconnect (heh) and today’s vocab word. So let’s look for a moment at the Emcee character from Cabaret (and on the way, we’ll revisit Pippin’s Leading Player).
Let’s get into it in more detail below the button, though. Join me? Good.
Pippin
Many critics said that the revival was too on the nose with all the literal circus stuff. I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure I’d agree–the ‘70s original run* kept the Leading Player and his (not insane) clown posse as mysterious, seductive, shapeshifting. The setting wasn’t explained; they weren’t literally in a circus, they were in an amorphous scenario where the title character’s life could be examined with or without the fourth wall. To set these clowns in a real circus leaves no nuance and no mystery—we all knew what was coming and so there was no tension at the final reveal. Well, this was always a creepy situation, we thought—why didn’t Pippin see it coming? Having the unexplained magic of the old version made the buildup much more tense, the stakes high, and Pippin’s bafflement till the last minute understandable.
This clip doesn’t show the very very very end of the song, where the ominous red-lit opening gets set afire and Pippin finally rejects once and for all the Leading Player’s (what we only now know as) plans for his destruction. But see how this number would have no impact whatsoever if we already knew LP was up to no good? Of course, we have the song ‘Glory’, where he glorifies war in all its bloodiness, but that doesn’t really go farther into the creep factor than any virtuous warrior propaganda commonly seen. There’s a brief moment where we see the love interest Catherine, just for a second, react to LP in a way that makes us go, ‘Oo, hm. He seems to be…ordering her? Is she a little afraid?’ but nothing is completely revealed until that climax at the end of this song above. See how they still dazzle and distract through the whole song, before the final reveal, which is that what they’re asking for is death? This song wouldn’t be able to occur if Pippin (and therefore, we) were fully creeped out by the Leading Player from song #1. Or at least there’d have been no stakes to this, and we’d all have been bored by now.
What is it about the 1970s that embraced the mime concept so thoroughly, anyway? I know I’ve Mused about this before when going in depth on mimes, but I wonder. It’s like what I was saying above: are we just that unsophisticated as media or arts consumers today, that we have to be smacked in the face with a real circus, in order to understand the magic of the clown? To me, that doesn’t actually help with understanding at all; it flattens the role of the Leading Player, takes away any magic involved with the story, and leaves no tension in the final reveal. In fact, it leaves no reveal at all: when the concept is already naked, there’s nothing left to strip away.
*The ‘73 Pippin show is very nearly the same as the ‘81 Broadway production that was recorded, and viewable today, which I highly recommend.
Cabaret
Part of why so many viewers reacted strangely to Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee performance at the Tonys is admittedly a simple lack of appreciation for what the shaman is supposed to do, and how that’s related to magic clowning. It’s too easy for those not accustomed, to sniff that whiff of death in the shamanic clown and feel super icky without knowing why. In other words, it turned into a clown = creepy thing immediately with no deeper layer to it than that. But.
It’s also a matter of (as I’ve been mentioning throughout this Musing) audiences not being widely read, or very cultured at all. I think that audiences lack cultural and arts knowledge because it’s very easy to dwell in one’s niche interest bubble, without expanding one’s experience. But that’s another article. Anyway. So most people seeing this performance won’t have a rich vein of clowning, mimes, or even historical context for the rise of fascism in Berlin, to be able to come to this piece of art for anything other than what they can see as its face value. Most don’t even know other past interpretations of Cabaret to compare this to, though you can see if you do, that the reveal of the story’s ending has gotten more and more hamfisted in more and more recent productions. I’ll talk about this in a minute (and this is part of the problem too).
It seems, though, that Redmayne himself had a clear idea of the shamanic aspect of the Emcee: that he’s a shapeshifter, that it’s unclear whether he really exists, even? In Playbill, it’s revealed that he began with a trained actor’s first impulse as someone who learned on Realism, but soon discovered that approach didn’t work for a shaman-clown: ‘Redmayne's initial actor's instinct was to create a backstory for The Emcee, but in the end, his attempts simply were not supported by the text. … the idea of The Emcee as an abstraction unclouded by a backstory, Redmayne was ready to create his character.’* And so I think this problem with the ruining of the reveal must lie more in the director than in his individual interpretation and performance.
*I didn’t realize this before I read the Playbill interview, but Redmayne went to Lecoq school for several months before playing this role, to prepare. That’s the preeminent mime school in France and therefore all the world, begun by OG mime and movement expert Jacques Lecoq. So the guy’s got serious clowning chops, gotta give him that.
What I’m seeing as the main problem with Redmayne’s performance is not in the fact that he’s a creepy clown, it’s that the reveal of the Emcee’s sinister nature happens too quickly. Instantly, in fact—‘Wilkommen’ is the opening number. A cold open, no less, which means this song is literally the first thing an audience sees.
We in the audience should be entranced by the Emcee at the beginning. Only at the very end of the show, when ‘Wilkommen’ is revisited, after all that happens in the story has come to pass, should we cringe at it. The buildup to that reveal, in other words, should be gradual, should grow in tension—we should only start to think ‘oh no’ at the end of Act One at the very earliest, when, slowly and beyond our control, that horrifically familiar straight-armed salute appears as the Kit Kat Club cabaret denizens, including the Emcee, suddenly now not so cute, sing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me.’
We’re not that stupid. Or are we?
My point: the Cabaret revivals, like the Pippin ones, spoon feed audiences too much. Do we really have such little context knowledge as theatregoers that we need the cast to be in striped concentration camp uniforms at the end, or to be smoked away, leaving empty piles of clothing behind? Do we really need a despondent Emcee wearing a pink triangle in the reprise? That’s a bludgeon, not a reveal. For that matter, do we need him to be already wearing no shirt and a leather harness around his crotch (instead of a tux) in the opener? What’s to reveal from there?
Here’s my take:
A real reveal would be the closing act ‘Wilkommen’ performed just like the opening version: enchanting, sexy, a little naughty, shiny, and welcoming. How much more chilling is that, than having the cast marched off to the ovens in front of our eyes? The message of the show’s story is revealed with that much more depth and terror if it’s done this way: ‘In here, life is beautiful,’ says the Emcee. In the opening act, we should believe him. When closing? There should be no difference in what he’s doing: the chills down our spine come from what we’ve seen behind the sparkly scenes, happening inside our heads. We didn’t know in the opening act. Now we know—now the horror has been revealed and can’t be covered up again.
The Emcee and Leading Player both are shamans: breaking the fourth wall, guiding us through and narrating the story, building up to the big terrifying reveal at the end. The Leading Player reveals that his goal was Pippin’s suicide all along, and it’s suddenly revealed in the penultimate number (as well as inferred that his band of beautiful clowns all went through this process before him). The Emcee is revealed to be a N*zi, or at the very least a supporter. Both creepy characters aren’t obviously creepy all along: they use cheer, funny clowning bits, sex, sparkles, and song, to distract and delight, with only subtle teases of reveals, until the end when the bomb drops. That bomb can’t drop in the opening number, or there’s nowhere to go. There’s no reveal; it’s all exposed from the beginning, which isn’t fun to watch at all.
Oooh, I like that. I have a couple of thoughts that I'm not sure I can tie into something coherent, but I'll try.
First is that the reveal is always tied in some way to an audience's willing suspension of disbelief. There's a bit of a bargain in which the audience agrees to let the performer control the sequence of information in return for being invested in the payoff at the end.
That's why a reveal, done badly, feels like it betrays a trust; that it's just manipulative or falls flat and the audience wonders why they every suspended disbelief.
Second, this connects to a topic that I muse about from time to time -- what is the best way to set the context for a performance? It's easy to think of an art or as being able to speak for itself (and, certainly, it's often a bad idea to try to speak *for it*).
But it's still the case that the audience comes in with certain expectations and that it's helpful to signal to people what is an appropriate expectation (I know less about theater, but in music genre is often the first signal that tells people what to expect -- if they hear rock or blues or synth-pop it locates their expectations).
[As a footnote there's an anecdote in the book Sleights of Mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleights_of_Mind in which (IIRC) Susana talks about going to a magic show while feeling sick, and not being fooled by any of the illusions because she was distracted enough by her illness that she didn't have enough attention to follow what the magician was doing and so her attention never got misdirected. She didn't have the energy to invest in the story that the magician was telling and so wasn't part of the reveal.]