'The best we could hope for would be good reviews. 'When we wrote the show, we thought we were taking an enormous chance,' the librettist told. One of the doubters was Masteroff himself. 'But it seemed obvious to us that it was a great idea.' 'A lot of people said to us afterwards, 'What on earth are you doing?',' remembered Kander. Kander, Ebb and Prince were certain they had hatched a golden idea for a musical. He had certain things he wanted to do that he told us about.' Hal had a lot of physical vision of how he wanted the show to look like. Out of all of that talking, music came, narrative came.

We met over and over and over, talking about what if this happened, what if that happened. 'The show was developed in Hal's living room. 'Hal invented this piece, you have to understand, and we were thrilled to be asked to be a part of it,' Kander told. Prince, Kander recalled, was very much in charge of the show's vision. He acquired the rights to both the Van Druten and Isherwood material, and drafted librettist Joe Masteroff (with whom he had worked on She Loves Me, and who had worked with Harris on his own play The Warm Peninsula) and the relatively unknown composers John Kander and Fred Ebb to create a musical around the story. But 15 years after I Am a Camera debuted, director-producer Harold Prince saw something more in the story. That might have been stage triumph enough for any literary work. 'Miss Harris was more essentially Sally Bowles than the Sally of my book,' he said, 'and much more like Sally than the real girl who long ago gave me the idea for my character.' Four years later it was made into a film, again starring Harris, which was not a success. Isherwood himself was impressed by the actress. The title is taken from the opening line of the novel, which runs, 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' When it bowed on Broadway, it was one of Van Druten's biggest successes and helped make its Sally Bowles, Julie Harris, a star.

He called it I Am a Camera and focused on the character of Sally, just one of many figures in Isherwood's stories. The novel was first adapted for the stage by British playwright John Van Druten. But the characters he created, including the English #cabaret singer Sally Bowles (the surname was borrowed from novelist Paul Bowles), have had a much more vibrant and public life on stage than they have on the page. Well, not the book itself, exactly, though 'Goodbye to Berlin' remains in print and is certainly still read. Little did novelist Christopher Isherwood know when he published his 1939 novella 'Goodbye to Berlin' - a semi-autobiographical account of his own time in Berlin in the 1930s - what an afterlife the book would have.

Isherwood goodbye to berlin