Gayle Rankin on Finding Her Sally Bowles in Broadway’s Debauched and Divisive ‘Cabaret’
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In 2014, Gayle Rankin made her Broadway debut in Sam Mendes’ revival of Cabaret, playing the supporting role of Fraulein Kost. Now, exactly a decade later, Rankin is playing the lead role of Sally Bowles opposite Eddie Redmayne in a new Broadway production that opened April 21.
“I feel like a completely different person,” says Rankin, as she sits in her dressing room in a red dressing gown, with her blond hair clipped back. “It’s so rare that you get to see your life marked by something so actual, by a piece of work. And what a piece of work to be able to gauge where you are as a human being.”
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In recent years, the Scottish actress — who grew up south of Glasgow — rose to prominence with a series of film and TV roles, including The Greatest Showman and HBO’s Perry Mason, and most notably as Sheila the She-Wolf in the Netflix series GLOW. Rankin — who studied drama at Juilliard, after winning a scholarship to the prestigious school — also has played several theater roles, including Ophelia opposite Oscar Isaac in a 2017 off-Broadway production of Hamlet.
The part of Sally Bowles, though, had seemed unattainable to her, and therefore she had not even put it on her bucket list. “I just didn’t ever think I was going to get that chance, which I think is what allows me to find my way inside of Sally Bowles because I don’t think Sally Bowles believes that she’s ever going to get that chance, either,” she says.
First produced in 1966, Cabaret follows Bowles, a bravado-filled singer who wants to be a star, performing at the seedy Kit Kat Club in prewar Berlin. Bowles and her compatriots are largely carefree, trying to live as if the party will never end, but their reverie is interrupted as the politics of the Nazi regime begin to seep in.
While there have been several revivals, this production, which is directed by Rebecca Frecknall and transferred from London to Broadway, feels and looks notably different from previous versions, which has caused a divided response from critics in New York.
The August Wilson Theatre has been remodeled to encompass three levels of bars meant to resemble the Kit Kat Club that are filled with dancers and musicians on platforms before the musical begins. During the show, dancers frequently slink and slither through the audience.
With a pointed party hat often affixed to his head, Redmayne plays the role of the club’s Emcee as a kind of disturbed clown, both through increasingly over-the-top costuming and exaggerated movements as he lurks around the proceedings. The production alternates between spectacle and grit, as the already innuendo-filled number “Two Ladies” becomes an all-out sexual bacchanalia. Confetti rains down onstage when the Emcee smashes a champagne glass to signify Kristallnacht.
And while Rankin’s Bowles first appears bulldozing through the audience in a green fur coat, she’s later stripped down to her wig cap and undergarments as she energetically and physically tears through anthems like “Cabaret.”
Amid all of this, the immersive nature of the production makes it more “inescapable” for the audience, she notes.
“It doesn’t pull any punches, which I appreciate,” says Rankin. “But it speaks to me in that it feels present. As dressed up as the production can look, I think there’s a real simplicity to it and a real reverence for the material.”
Beyond relating to the character, Rankin says that she prepared for the role by studying the text, traveling to Berlin and reading Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories — which inspired the musical and its creators, composers John Kander and Frank Ebb and book writer Joe Masteroff.
She avoided seeing the London production of this Cabaret, which is still running (after opening with Redmayne in December 2021), but says other famous interpretations of the role, including by Liza Minnelli, Natasha Richardson, Emma Stone and Michelle Williams — the latter two each starred, at one point, in the 2014 production with Rankin — have been unavoidable and have helped inform her own interpretation. Her goal is for Bowles to be seen as less of an enigma and more as someone who is unabashedly herself, even in moments of shame or vulnerability.
Rankin worked with Frecknall largely on movement for the character, which includes big sweeping and jumping motions when Bowles wants to make her presence known and rare moments of utter stillness in those times of vulnerability, as when she sings “Maybe This Time,” reflecting on the possibility of a better life. But ultimately, her research takes a back seat to the force of the character once she’s onstage.
“There’s no me figuring her out. She’s driving,” says Rankin.
In addition to her part in Cabaret, Rankin recently finished filming her role as Alys Rivers, a healer and witch (originally from George R.R. Martin’s novel Fire & Blood) in HBO’s second season of House of the Dragon. It was a “joyous” experience for Rankin, who is less a Game of Thrones expert and more a Shakespeare devotee, so she approached the part as “a kind of Shakespeare cosplay, but with reverence.”
But ultimately, theater is still her favorite medium. And, with this production, Rankin is grateful to be able to bring Sally Bowles to a new generation of theatergoers. “It’s just what I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “And so I feel so alive. I just feel the most alive I’ve felt.”
This story first appeared in the April 24 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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