Cabaret’s And Castle’s Curtains

November 20, 1966, the musical ‘Cabaret’ got staged for the first time on Broadway. The unusual start, with an empty stage and the curtains already up while the audience was still taking seats, with no overture but a drum roll and cymbal crash, led the musical to the spotlights many times and spawned the 1972 film with Liza Minnelli. Another kind of ‘drum roll and cymbal crash’ with curtains and spotlights involved happened on this day, the year 1992: the Windsor Castle, England’s largest inhabited castle and the official ‘weekend home’ of Queen Elizabeth, got on fire when a spotlight ignited a curtain. 15 hours and 1.5 million gallons of water later, that ‘act’ on the Windsor scene ended. Luckily, that stage was as empty as the Broadway’s: due to maintenance work on the castle, many of its valuables had been removed. Image by Photobucket/DeeSobek