A Diverse, Inclusive ‘Cabaret’ Opens in London, Starring Eddie Redmayne
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LONDON — The thing that few people seem to recall about the 1920s was that they roared — and then they drew blood.
A new London production of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne as the creepy master of ceremonies, captures that moment when the freedom, joie de vivre and cultural richness of Weimar Berlin came to a horrifying halt as the Nazis came to power.
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While the musical, which opens at the Playhouse Theatre on Monday, takes place at the end of the ’20s, with Germany recovering from one war and hurtling toward the next, this new production is very much of the current moment.
The dancers in the Kit Kat club are gender-fluid; the cast members range from young drama school graduates to middle-aged actors, and there’s not a bowler hat, fishnet stocking or black cane in sight.
Indeed, there’s a garbage bin near the foyer where Tom Scutt, the head of scenic and costume design, has tossed out many of the traditional “Cabaret” props, including a bowler hat and the straight-back Thonet chair that the Sally Bowles character uses for her performances.
The dancers wear their own tattoos and piercings with pride, and those permanent embellishments are just as much a part of the costume design as the crocheted bikini tops, silky tap pants, corsets, garter belts and devoré dressing gowns. Hair has been sculpted into finger waves and kiss curls, while nails and eyelids are dark and Goth.
Sally Bowles, played by Jessie Buckley, is as colorful and showy as a peacock, appearing first in a ruffled, white Shirley Temple-style dress; moving onto a dramatically draped dressing gown, and later her signature mint green fur coat. But by the end, she’s wearing a drab brown suit — just like everybody else.
In a joint interview ahead of the premiere, director Rebecca Frecknall and Scutt, both of whom are in their mid-30s, argued that the musical offers many parallels with topics of debate today. Themes such as censorship, conformity, racism and state-imposed restrictions on social behavior figure big in this production, as does the enduring human impulse for freedom and self-expression.
This latest production is based on the stage play by John Van Druten, which in turn draws from Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin between the wars. The music is by John Kander, with lyrics by Fred Ebb. The headline producers are Ambassador Theatre Group Productions and Underbelly.
Frecknall, who is associate director at the Almeida Theatre in London, said she approached “Cabaret” the way she does any play, asking, “‘How do you treat it like a new piece of work, unlock it for a contemporary audience, and make what it’s talking about resonate with the life they are living?'”
She added: “This is a piece that’s looking at the decay of a society, and how that ripples out and affects people. It’s about identity, and how humans through the years have ostracized and demonized the outsider. We are looking at human behavior under extreme social and political change and pressure, and that feels really resonant now. So it was about making those parallels vibrate in the room.”
That room is unlike any other in London’s West End right now: the playhouse has been reconfigured as a theater in the round, surrounded by little cocktail tables, each with a working telephone and a light that flashes when fellow guests — or cast members — call. Champagne, beer, pretzels and schnapps are all on offer, conjuring the play’s nightclub vibe.
The production is even called “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” and guests can book the tables (or the balcony) and time travel back to 1920s Berlin.
The bar in the main foyer is awash in yellow gold like the backdrop of a Gustav Klimt painting, and the walls are covered in swirling graffiti that echoes the work of Marc Chagall. The mural, which features naked bodies, was done by Dominic Myatt, a graduate of Goldsmiths and the Royal Drawing School, who has collaborated with Vivienne Westwood, Showstudio and Selfridges in the past.
Scutt said that commissioning “a young, queer artist to do the graffiti in the gold bar was really quite therapeutic. It cured all sorts of deep-seated issues I have with traditional western theater spaces and their loftiness.”
His vision for the foyer, the three bars (in addition to the gold bar, there’s a red one and a green one) and Kit Kat Club as a whole was about creating a sense of intimacy, and informality.
“There was no way, coming out of this pandemic, that we would have allowed, or felt comfortable with, creating a ‘Cabaret’ that looked and sounded like other productions that have come before,” Scutt said.
Frecknall and Scutt said they wanted to celebrate individuality, too, and underline just how quickly it can give way to conformity.
Frecknall said she and Scutt took much of their inspiration from an early line in the play, when one of the characters tells Clifford Bradshaw, the young, gay — and incredibly earnest — American writer, played by the Black actor Omari Douglas: “This is Berlin, relax and be yourself.”
For the set and the costumes, Frecknall said she and Scutt drew much of their inspiration from images of Berlin’s cabaret clubs of the 1920s where performers were often in costume, or cross-dressing.
“There’d be someone who was randomly dressed as a clown, someone in a suit with a sailor tassel and men in dresses. There was a real eclecticism,” she said.
The costumes take their cues from those vintage cabaret pictures, but also from grim, spooky German Expressionist paintings, the Dance of Death and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” Some of Redmayne’s costumes look like they walked off the film set of Stephen King’s “It.”
Redmayne is sinister in every scene, whether he’s dressed as a clown; wearing a freakishly small party hat; dancing with a gorilla, or wielding his pointy, mechanical fingernails. He’s particularly unnerving at the end of the play when he’s buttoned into a sharply tailored suit, ready to march forth alongside the Nazis.
By contrast, there is a richness to the cabaret performers’ costumes: Scutt has dressed them like modern dancers, in Lycra bandeau tops and shorts to match the color of their skin, and has layered over crochet pieces, silky fabrics, garter belts and corsets.
“Everybody’s in the same thing underneath,” said Scutt, adding that he wanted to wrest the dancers’ costumes and movements away from the male gaze, and from traditional notions of gender and “sexiness.”
The crochet pieces are there for a specific reason.
“I was thinking ‘What is not sexy?’ and I loved the idea of crochet, and knitted things. It felt of the period, but quite sort of ’60s and ’70s — and like it could be quite ’90s, too,” said Scutt. “There’s a homespun quality to it, too, and a childishness” that echoes the play’s movement from innocence and experience, he added.
Scutt spent time considering fabrics, knowing they had to work for a theater-in-the-round. “It was about ‘accessing’ people’s bodies, so we didn’t want solids, but rather porous surfaces, which is why there is crochet, translucent clothing and devoré velvet,” said Scutt.
He wanted each of the six Kit Kat Club characters to be recognizable, which is why Texas wears sparkling gold boots; Victor dons green suede shoes, and Lulu’s look nods to club culture. Scutt said he chose the slinky crocheted tops because they’re on trend right now.
Scutt also referenced “Fantasia,” Jean Paul Gaultier’s sailor styles, queer club culture, punk and shibari bondage. The long, gold silk fringes on the dancers’ costumes in the “Money” song winked to bondage, “the constriction of poverty,” and whirling dervishes.
At the end, sadly, everyone ends up wearing the same suit, shirt and tie, hunched over and marching in a circle directed by Redmayne’s MC. The game is over, and the wild, spontaneous “Be yourself, it’s Berlin” culture has been rubbed out entirely.
The colorful Bowles dons her drab, baggy suit as she bids farewell to her lover Clifford Bradshaw, who’s fed up with the fascists and is heading home to Pennsylvania.
Scutt said he and Frecknall experimented, at one point, with suits — but no shirts and ties. “And then there was the day they put the shirts and ties on, and it completed the image, and I just instantly cried, and said ‘Yes.'”
Inside and outside the Kit Kat Club, Scutt said he sees the suit as an oppressive statement of power: “One day, we’re going to look back, and the suit is going to look as alien a uniform as something from a church,” he said.
He’d do well to steer clear of the tailors on Savile Row, at least until the play finishes its run, which, judging from the excellent performances, won’t be for a while. Redmayne and Buckley will be performing until March when new actors will replace them, and there is no end date set.
Launch Gallery: A Diverse, Inclusive “Cabaret” Opens in London, Starring Eddie Redmayne
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