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.

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.