Editors’ Note: all images are taken from @kitkatclubnyc on Instagram.
On Sunday, April 21st, Broadway opened its highly anticipated revival of “Cabaret” at the August Wilson Theater, starring Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles. “Cabaret” is widely considered to be one of the greatest musicals of all time, featuring an ingenious score by songwriting duo John Kander and Fred Ebb, and a powerful book by Joe Masteroff. Set in 1930s Berlin, the musical focuses on the hedonistic lifestyle of the lavish Kit Kat Club, a nightclub spearheaded by the eccentric Emcee, and warns us about the danger of debauchery and escapism in the face of fascism. Today, with injustice and political turmoil growing across the world, this message remains, quite unfortunately, more relevant than ever.
“Cabaret” revolves around an American novelist named Cliff Bradshaw, who visits Berlin to find inspiration for his new book, but ends up entering a relationship with an extravagant showgirl, Sally Bowles, who performs at the Kit Kat Club. It also follows the doomed relationship between Fräulein Schneider, the proprietress who rents Cliff his room, and Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit-store owner whose shop gets vandalized by violent Nazi sympathizers.
“Cabaret” has been revived and reinterpreted countless times since its premiere in 1966, most famously in the 1972 film of the same name, which starred Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli as the two protagonists. Equally well-known is Sam Mendes’s Broadway production, with Alan Cumming as the Emcee, a vibrant staging that ends with the Emcee taking off his jacket to reveal a striped uniform with a yellow Star of David, indicating that he, himself, was a holocaust victim, living in denial all along.
Director Rebecca Frecknall reimagines “Cabaret” completely, transforming the August Wilson Theater into an immersive nightclub with food, drinks and pre-show entertainment. Guests are invited to arrive at the club an hour before showtime, where they enter through a seedy neon-lit alleyway and are welcomed with free shots of schnapps, as well as stickers to cover their phone cameras. Inside the club, there are several bars and food stations, where a prologue cast of musicians and dancers roams around and puts on dazzling mini-performances. Frecknall’s vision is a “Cabaret” that seduces and captivates the audience, allowing them to truly leave their troubles behind. The production originally opened, to great acclaim, at the Playhouse Theatre on London’s West End a few years ago — a triumphant run that swept the Laurence Olivier Awards in 2022 and is still running today.
Even the interior of the house is completely reconstructed, with the original stage being entirely ripped out. In its place sits a small circular plinth, surrounded by an audience on all sides, that rotates and elevates at different moments in the show. My sole critique of this staging is that the performers tend to favor one side of the audience (the theater’s original mezzanine), an unfortunate inevitability of theater-in-the-round. However, the view is hardly less immersive on the other side. The orchestra level features dozens of cabaret-style tables, where theatergoers are able to eat and drink throughout the show. As audience members enter the theater, ensemble members perform a string of fun pre-show dance numbers on the main stage, often inviting audience members onstage to join them. Interestingly enough, despite the club’s evidently expensive maximalist style and immaculate attention to detail, the stage itself is scarcely decorated, representing the club, Cliff’s room and other various locations. Frecknall’s masterful conception (not to mention the impeccable design work by Tom Scutt) ensures that, by showtime, every audience member is deeply immersed in the world of “Cabaret.”
Suddenly, once everyone is settled in, the iconic drum roll introduction begins and the house lights dim. The crowd erupts in deafening cheers as Redmayne ascends to the stage from an underground platform in a colorful costume and a small green party hat. After the applause dies down, the orchestra begins playing the opening bars of “Willkommen,” while our Emcee eyes down his audience and dances with impeccable smoothness and fluid motion. Those who haven’t already heard Redmayne singing would be shocked by the distinctive tones of his beautiful voice, not to mention his impressive diction as he alternates between English, German and French throughout the song. The highlight of the song comes after Redmayne introduces Sally, when a colorfully dressed Gayle Rankin emerges as if from nowhere on the balcony and belts out a powerful “Hello, darlings!,” and makes her way down to the stage, interacting with audience members along the way.
Apart from Redmayne and Rankin, the ensemble also shines throughout this opening number, both in their singing and dancing, bringing an unparalleled energy to the stage that makes each individual Cabaret boy and girl feel like a unique character with their own intriguing story. (This idea is expanded upon later in the show, as Fritzie doubles as the prostitute Fräulein Kost and Bobby is revealed to have had a romantic history with Cliff.) The choreography here by Julia Cheng is superb, a trend that continues throughout the rest of the show. By the end of “Willkommen,” it truly feels like you’re immersed in the heart of 1930s Berlin, in the decadent extravagance of a fully realized Kit Kat Club.
Everything about the production, from its lighting to its sound, is unlike anything Broadway has ever seen, but what truly brings this show home is its stellar cast. According to Redmayne, the Emcee is the role that “made [him] want to become an actor.” He masterfully delivers the show’s most famous one-liners, such as “Leave your troubles outside” and “Here, life is beautiful.” Redmayne’s “Two Ladies” and “Money” are fun and exciting, demonstrating his excellent dancing ability and unique comfort with an audience, while each introduction of Sally (“presenting the toast of Mayfair, Fräulein Sally Bowles!”) is piercingly loud and charmingly clownish; on the other hand, his “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and “I Don’t Care Much” are softly sung, representing the human side of the Emcee’s character. His best performance is in the Act 2 song “If You Could See Her,” a satirical routine with a woman in a gorilla costume, in which he complains about society’s disapproval of their love and encourages the audience to be more open-minded. The routine, meant to symbolically defend the union of Fräulein Schneider and Herr Schultz, concludes with the Emcee whispering, “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all,” a line that draws gasps and goose-bumps from the audience. Redmayne’s demeanor — and attire — darkens with the changing political climate. At the end of the show, he returns to the stage one last time, wearing just a plain suit with no makeup, to deliver the chilling line, “Where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I told you so,” which brings the show full circle. From his gorgeous singing to his unique interpretation of the character, Redmayne’s Emcee undoubtedly ranks with Grey and Cumming’s as one of the best performances in the history of musical theater.
Frecknall’s production elevates Sally to the center of the plot, concentrating on her personal struggles, with Cliff serving as an observant outsider and the Emcee as a narrating bystander. Gayle Rankin fully embraces this character, bringing to life a multifaceted take on Sally’s character, with her devil-may-care attitude serving as a façade for her inner turmoil that grows more apparent as the show progresses. Her first two songs, “Don’t Tell Mama” and “Mein Lieber Herr,” focus on the former aspect, as she performs them with energetic histrionics and flirtatious twists and twirls. Her shattering rendition of the showstopper “Maybe This Time” shifts to the latter, sung almost entirely still, with minimal body movement but deeply thoughtful expressivity. Here, rather than conceal her inner conflict, she lets it all out in a deeply heartbreaking manner. Rankin rounds out Sally’s character arc perfectly with a gut-wrenching performance of the title song, “Cabaret” — which many misinterpret as a fun, happy tune — that alternates between singing, speaking and shouting cries. She belts out the climax with ferocious volume but solid vocal control, bringing out Sally’s pain without necessarily sounding ugly. Each “life is a cabaret, old chum” is laced with an undertone of dramatic irony, while the final “Come to the cabaret!” is strong and well-sustained.
The underrated stars of the show are Bebe Neuwirth, a veteran Broadway superstar and Tony winner, as Fräulein Schneider, and Steven Skybell as Herr Schultz, who deliver pristine performances and wonderful chemistry. Their best moment comes in the song “It Couldn’t Please Me More,” from the first act, when he offers her a pineapple as a present — when she asks if he would like a slice, he charmingly replies, “That would be nice, but frankly it would give me gas,” a bar that always draws chuckles. Their other duet, “Married,” where he proposes to her, is similarly delightful and leaves the entire audience with giddy smiles on their faces. Neuwirth also excels in her two solo numbers, the lovely “So What?” and impassioned “What Would You Do?” The latter, a desperate cry for help about how she would have to break up with Schultz to keep herself safe — facing the reality that she cannot go through life with a “so what?” attitude — left many audience members in tears.
Ato Blankson-Wood shone as Cliff, especially in the book scenes of the second act. For example, when discussing Nazism with Sally, he, angered by her indifference, shouts, “Don’t you see that if you’re not against all this, you’re for it?” Moreover, in a powerful display of dramatic acting, when Sally reveals that she had an abortion, he screams at her and attempts to strike her, before breaking down before her in tears. While Cliff does not have many singing moments in the show, his character remains deeply complex, transitioning from a mere struggling writer to a lovesick father-to-be, all while grappling with the horrors brewing around him. That said, Blankson-Wood still made the most of his few singing moments, like his verse in “Perfectly Marvelous,” one of the musical’s most famous duets, and the finale, where he tearfully sings “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome,” reminiscing on the Kit Kat Club’s formerly exuberant atmosphere.
The Tony race between “Cabaret” and the hit “Merrily We Roll Along” will certainly be fierce as nominations approach, not only for Best Revival but also for Best Actor. I would personally go with “Cabaret” in both categories, but you cannot go wrong with “Merrily,” whose magical performances by Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe turned one of Sondheim’s notorious flops into a box-office sensation.
The only downside of attending this “Cabaret” is its hefty price. But there is no doubt in my mind that it is worth every penny. It lures you in with booze, song and promises of fun times that never end, encouraging you to forget the horrors of the outside world, and yet it spits you out sobered and disconcerted by the realization that life taken lightly always leads to horrors. All that to say, it makes for an enchanting evening at the theater.
