CABARET CULTURE HAS CABARET CULTURE HAS RETURNED TO THE FORMER RETURNED TO THE FORMER “PARIS OF THE EAST”. “PARIS OF THE EAST”. RICHARD BAIMBRIDGE RICHARD BAIMBRIDGE INTRODUCES US TO THE INTRODUCES US TO THE STARS OF SHANGHAI’S STARS OF SHANGHAI’S NEW CHINATOWN NEW CHINATOWN
If you’re at all plugged into Shanghai’s nightlife, you’ve no doubt run into a well-dressed English gentleman with graying hair, a small wisp of a goatee, sparkling eyes and a knack for incredible storytelling. Chatting with Norman Gosney is like reading a history of rock ’n’ roll, from Pink Floyd’s first gigs at a small club in London to the careers of Madonna, the Beastie Boys and Run DMC. And Norman says he’s had a hand in them all. After all, he didn’t just live at the Chelsea Hotel, along with every other who’s who in the New York underground art world — he owned the penthouse rooftop garden! And now, this dark prince of the New York club scene has set his sights on re-inventing nightlife in Shanghai.
And how did a proudly itinerate drop-out who hitchhiked to India in the 1960s end up getting cozy with the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert De Niro and Bjork?
“I moved to New York in the 1980s and was lucky enough to fall in with a bad crowd,” he says with distinctive ability to turn a phrase. Having been raised in a pub in Bristol where his Uncle Walt would stand on a piano singing with a pair of pints in his hand, Norman Gosney has both entertainment and cocktails coursing through his blood. He created some of New York’s best clubs – Area, Danceteria, Tunnel, Limelight – places whose names were legendary in the pre-Paris Hilton clubbing era where, as Norman puts it, “You got in based on how cool you were, not how rich you were.”
But all that ended with the arrival of Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s family-friendly makeover of Times Square in the 1990s. Norman’s last big venture was Club New York, where rapper Sean “Puffy” Combs went down for weapons charges but was later acquitted.
“After that, I realized I wanted to do things on a much smaller scale,” Norman says. He returned to his roots — vaudeville, burlesque and the kind of slapstick he grew up with as a child in the old British “news theaters” of the 1950s. What’s more, Gosney added a touch of risqué Parisian-style cabaret, using dancers culled from Broadway, and opened illegal speak-easies — joints that sold illegal alcohol — in empty office buildings across lower Manhattan.
“Major movie stars, film directors, celebrities were coming every night,” he says. “No advertising. Just word of mouth.”
The formula was a huge success and brought about the current renaissance of cabaret culture that’s spread from New York to other cities across the globe. Eventually, however, the authorities caught on to the Gosney speakeasies and began shutting them down.
Fed up with the newly sanitized version of New York City that forbade, among other things, smoking and dancing in bars, he grabbed his best chorus girl, Amelia Kallmanis and headed for Shanghai. Once upon a time, the “Paris of the East” had a reputation that exceeded even New York’s in terms of licentiousness. There, Norman and Amelia reckoned, was the future nightclub frontier. But what they found there, however, left them profoundly unimpressed.
While few will argue that Shanghai is the new party capital of Asia, the clubs often tend to be quite vacuous. While there is no shortage in the flow of Moët champagne and multi-million dollar Philippe Starck-designed venues, one quickly gets the sense in Shanghai of having seen it all before.
“Who cares if a club is designed by Philippe Starck?” Norman moans. “It’s about how you feel in the space that matters.”
Indeed, there is a dearth of entertainment for the over-25 crowd, as well as for those sitting bored at VIP tables with a bottle of Chivas and Top 40 hip-hop blaring at earsplitting decibels.
About a year since they arrived in Shanghai, Amelia dusted off her cabaret dress and Norman found the ideal location (a Buddhist temple built in 1931 on the northern end of the Bund) to bring Gosney & Kallman’s
Chinatown to Shanghai. He brought along choreographer Jean Marc of Paris’s Moulin Rouge, British emcee Charlie (a graduate of the theater school that produced Orlando Bloom and Hugh Grant) and a chorus line of girls from Brazil to China. Norman and Amelia hope to revive what Norman calls “Hollywood’s film noir vision of Shanghai night clubs in the 1930s” – complete with rickshaw drivers to deliver the guests to the front door.
“People visiting or traveling through Shanghai want to see some echo of its greatness in the 1930s,” Norman says.
“When you step over Suzhou Creek [at the Northern Bund], it’s like being in the real China – the China you imagined before you arrived in Shanghai.”
Here at Gosney & Kallman’s Chinatown, every night promises something completely different — a big production with dancers, lounge singers, jazz, Chinese acrobats, comedy, cabaret — and oh yes, gourmet hotdogs served by girls in stilts. And why? “Because it’s just like Coney Island in the 1920s — and because no one else is doing it,” says Norman.
When asked what spurred the inspiration for his recreated Chinatown, Norman says, “Paris in the Gay 1990s, Weimar Germany from 1926 to 1936, English music hall from Victorian Times to the 1950s, plus a touch of classic Vegas, and of course the gentleman’s clubs of Shanghai in the 1920s.” It sounds like a tall order, but Norman is confident. “It’s going to be a new high in low-brow,” he says. And that’s a promise the man will deliver.
Gosney & Kallman’s Chinatown is located at 471 Zhapu lu, www.chinatownshanghai.com
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Explore nightlife in the “Sin City of the East”, then and now
Today’s Shanghai is an unrepentant party town with hotspots on the Bund like Bar Rouge and Glamour Bar packed each weekend with a rowdy mix — expats, smartly-dressed, newly-rich locals and bemused visitors in awe of the brazenly conspicuous consumption. Still, Shanghai today pales in comparison to the way it was in the 1920s and 1930s — the “Sin City of the East”. A Shanghai missionary supposedly said, “If God lets Shanghai stay, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.” At the glamorous Paramount Ballroom, wealthy men fought for the hands of Shanghai’s famous “taxi girls”, buying rolls of tickets for a dance. Shut down by the communist regime in 1956, it re-opened in 2001, a dancehall sans its former glory.
Today, the elite gather at jazz clubs like JZ’s or at hip-hop lounges like Attica, Park 97 and the members-only Volar (designed by Philippe Starck). Try cocktails at Face Bar where a throw-back sign from the old days reads “Foreigners forbidden without a permit.” While the Bund no longer has “the longest bar in the world”, in the 1930s British Gentleman’s Club, you can still enjoy a great view from the bar in the back of New Heights Restaurant at Three on the Bund.
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