Anna Maxwell Martin as Sally Bowles
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John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 musical
Cabaret has an illustrious—and often edgy—history. It began life with Harold Prince’s original production that paid tribute to the show’s Weimar Republic setting by featuring an authentic star of the era, Lotte Lenya, in the cast. The transfer to London in 1968 featured a girlish Judi Dench making her musical theatre debut as Sally Bowles. In recent memory, Sam Mendes’s 1993 Donmar Warehouse revival that later transferred to Broadway in 1998 saw Alan Cumming playing a highly sexualised Emcee in both places. The show has constantly morphed and evolved in different directions. In Bob Fosse’s 1972 film version, it became a blazing vehicle for Liza Minnelli’s Oscar-winning turn as Sally Bowles. And now the tawdry and touching show is about to make a return to the London stage.
Theatre.com spoke to this new production’s director, choreographer and four lead actors to find out their distinctive approaches to this classic show. They are an eclectic bunch, and there’s the potential for their union to be electrifying. Both the director Rufus Norris and star Anna Maxwell Martin, who is playing Sally Bowles, are entirely new to musicals, while choreographer Javier De Frutos is an internationally renowned dance choreographer who has only recently made his musical theatre debut with a regional production of Carousel earlier in the summer. James Dreyfus, playing the Emcee, has previously won an Olivier for his performance in the Gershwin-Weill musical Lady in the Dark at the National Theatre, and was Carmen Ghia in the original London company of The Producers. Michael Hayden, playing Clifford Bradshaw, took over the same role in the most recent Broadway staging of the show, but has juggled plays, musicals and films ever since he made his professional debut as Billy Bigelow in the National’s production of Carousel that subsequently transferred to New York. British stage and film veteran Sheila Hancock, who plays Fraulein Schneider, played Mrs. Lovett in the short-lived West End transfer of the original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd and has most recently played Mama Rose in a regional production of Gypsy.
Cabaret promises to be a revealing take on the classic—in every sense. At a press preview of a few scenes from the show in a London church hall, it was apparent during the Act One finale of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” that members of the company were actually stripping. But there’s a serious purpose and intention behind the apparent shock value that such moments might suggest. Read on to learn what key company members had to say about the new production.
Rufus Norris
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THE DIRECTOR
For Norris, the opportunity to helm Cabaret was not one he could turn down, even though he’s never done a musical before. “The great joy of doing Cabaret is that it’s a fantastic musical. It’s full of humour and emotion and entertainment, but at its heart it’s a very serious piece about a very serious subject matter. We feel that it’s our responsibility to try and celebrate all those multiple facets whilst avoiding sentiment and too much worthy indulgence.”
So he’s got very definite ideas about how he’s proceeding, and is trying to bring out a new facet to the world that the musical exists in. “As I understand it, in previous productions there’s been the world of the cabaret and that of Fraulein Schneider’s boarding house, but we have a third one, Berlin, and the way that it moves from one to the other means that it’s through-choreographed throughout.”
He admits he was inspired by the film version of the show to draw that world out. “One thing the film has got and the show doesn’t is a real sense of the community and environment around which the cabaret and the characters exist. So in that sense, it is very useful.”
He insists he isn’t intimated by the reputations of the previous productions or film—“You’ve just got to get on with it, really. It would be insane to do this in New York at the moment because that production was there for so long, and it’s too fresh. But not many saws it at the Donmar and actually that was quite a long time ago. The only tricky thing with that is that all the critics will have seen that production, and in the end you can’t avoid comparisons. One of the other challenges is that everybody knows the film, so they think they know [the stage musical], but they don’t. It’s very different.”
And it’s very different from anything else playing in London, too. “When you look at the competition and the breadth of musical work that’s on at the moment, the West End is incredibly healthy with a robust musical theatre life going on. So I think there’s a place for an adult, serious-minded piece of work. It’s a terrific time to be doing it.”
Javier De Frutos
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THE CHOREOGRAPHER
For chorographer Javier De Frutos, who has recently taken up an appointment as director of Phoenix Dance Theatre in Leeds, musicals are a new departure at a time when he’s reinventing himself anyway. “It’s all come at once,” he says, “but I’m pretty good at multi-tasking—until I have a stroke, that is, and that’ll be the end of it. This is so vastly different from what I’m doing out there nowadays that it’s a healthy thing to do.”
There are some similarities with De Frutos’ previous work. “Rufus wanted me to go back to some of my early work—the naughty ones, he says, for this. And it’s been interesting to go back to what I used to do but 10 years later now, and see how I can use it and put it into this new context.”
One of the keys to that “naughty” work is nudity. “There may be quite a few moments when there is full nudity onstage,” he reveals. “My company used to do this all the time—but in the context of this, the research I did showed that Germany at that time had a complete obsession with naturist camps. In ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me,’ the shedding of clothes is like a shedding of skin. I have brought some of the dancers I know very well with me, because I knew they could handle this kind of thing very well.”
He has also collaborated closely with the director on establishing the overall vision for the show, which he describes as “athletic and vicious.” The process, he says, has “been very, very organic, that’s why I’ve enjoyed it. I didn’t just want to be a choreographer for hire. But here, the triangle between Rufus, the designer Katrina Lindsay and me is very strong. Nothing exists in a vacuum—the choreography is completely integrated into the action. I researched as much as I could to really feel what we would do if we were in that situation. They were very, very desperate times. The important thing we discovered was that there was absolutely nothing glamorous about that particular time. Germany was very, very poor; and the cabarets were some kind of escapism, but they didn’t really have much money, so it was all done on a shoestring. It was a city on the edge, because of poverty and hunger and the influence of alcohol and the high consumption of drugs. The edge brings violence at the drop of a hat; and the edge also brings sex at the drop of a hat.”
He has been striving to reflect “the completely hedonistic freedom” of the time, too. But he also wants to ensure that the “show delivers what it has to deliver and doesn’t lose its sense of irony, because that is its strength. ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ is so heartbreakingly beautiful, but when you leave for the intermission, you can’t believe that you’ve just applauded a Nazi song! That sense of irony is really the key to the show.”
James Dreyfus
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THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES
“For about 10 years”, Dreyfus says, “people have been saying I should play this part. I didn’t know it, and one day I watched the film. Then I heard about this production, but didn’t pay it much attention. I was doing Donkeys’ Years in the West End, and the casting director Maggie Lunn came to see it. The next day, I was having tea with Rufus. I was at RADA with him, and he told me it was between me and a 76-year-old man to play the part. Then I came back and sang for the musical director, and they gave me the part.”
Dreyfus is perhaps best known for his “camp” roles on television and as Carmen Ghia in The Producers, but he bristles at the suggestion that the Emcee might be conceived in a similar vein. “People see what they want to see,” he says, “and if they think that’s what they’re going to get, that’s what they will see. The Emcee is an entertainer, and by the nature of it they camp it up. I don’t have a problem playing camp people, but not being camp myself, it’s not who I am. I never hear people saying that Mel Gibson only plays straight roles. And we’re going quite a different way with it—the Emecee here isn’t camp. He’s very mysterious, very dark and rather evil, rather cruel, and something of an empty character with no soul, no morals.”