How ‘Cabaret’ became Broadway’s hottest ticket — and most divisive show

Gayle Rankin, his current “Cabaret” co-star, first encountered the musical when she booked a supporting part in the 2014 Broadway remount of Sam Mendes’s heralded version of the production. Approached about returning to star in the Redmayne-anchored revival, this time as the off-kilter ingenue Sally Bowles, the Scottish actor leaped at a role played by the likes of Liza Minnelli, Judi Dench and Emma Stone. “It’s a huge meal,” Rankin says. “But I think, for me as an artist, that’s what I always only ever want.”

Rankin’s director, Rebecca Frecknall, credits her father with her obsessive interest in the show. By recording Mendes’s 1993 London production of “Cabaret” on VHS, he gave a young Frecknall the means to get lost in 1930s Berlin ad nauseam. When he died in 2021, while she was overseeing rehearsals of her West End staging of “Cabaret,” she rummaged through his belongings and unearthed a playbill for a college production in which he played the Emcee. “It was a show,” Frecknall says, “that was very dear to him.”

Together, Redmayne, Rankin and Frecknall are spearheading “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” an immersive spin on Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 musical about the hedonistic decadence of jazz-age Germany and the Weimar Republic’s plunge into fascism. Since opening in April at an overhauled August Wilson Theatre, “Cabaret” has become Broadway’s hottest ticket and the season’s most Tony-nominated revival.

But for every critic who has embraced the buzzy revival (Entertainment Weekly called it a “gritty, haunting production that is jaw-droppingly gorgeous from start to finish”) there’s one who spurned it (the New York Times lamented that “too often a misguided attempt to resuscitate the show breaks its ribs”).

How did this “Cabaret” prompt such impassioned reactions? Frecknall’s mission statement hints at an answer. “I’m not interested in creating something safe,” says the 38-year-old, who has developed a reputation for reinvigorating works from such titans as Tennessee Williams and Anton Chekhov. “I am interested in creating something really rigorous, and it’s great that it makes people feel something.” In spoiler-filled interviews, Redmayne, Rankin and Frecknall dissected the decisions that differentiate their revival from its celebrated predecessors.

This “Cabaret” sets itself apart some 75 minutes before the curtain rises, when the first patrons enter the theater through a 52nd Street alleyway, navigate a disorienting network of neon-lit hallways and take a shot of schnapps along the way. The eventual destination: a series of moody bars and lounges, where theatergoers settle in for a cocktail hour populated with vaudevillian musicians and dancers.

Frecknall admits to initially being “a bit allergic” to the producers’ idea of creating a pre-show “prologue.” But as she collaborated with prologue director Jordan Fein, choreographer Julia Cheng and scenic designer Tom Scutt on shaping the experience, they unlocked its tone-setting potential. Making the pre-show free of narrative avoided undercutting the musical itself, and the decision to blend contemporary and period-appropriate performance styles lent the proceedings a purposefully timeless quality.

“It’s creating a tapestry,” Frecknall says, “that’s drawing across all the decades that ‘Cabaret’ has touched on — the decade it’s set in, the decade it’s written in, the decade it’s being performed in — to create a world.”

The immersion continues as the audience migrates to the auditorium, which has been revamped for an in-the-round production complete with stage-side table seating and actors roaming the audience. To Redmayne, a producer on the show who wanted it to evoke that claustrophobic Fringe venue he played in 2001, the proximity proves ripe for “live performance at its rawest.”

“It feels quite intimate,” Rankin says. “The material is kind of begging for it, and it’s a really cool feeling to invite people into your proverbial home.”

This time around, Redmayne aimed to accentuate the Emcee’s inherent amorphousness and build something altogether unidentifiable. So the Fantastic Beasts film star, who counts an Oscar and a Tony among his accolades, went back to school. By studying physical theater for a few weeks at the Lecoq institute in Paris, Redmayne learned to strip away any vanity while stumbling through absurdist exercises and improvisatory scenarios.

“The thing that I took away mostly,” Redmayne says, “was coming back and being prepped to go into the rehearsal space ready to fail — and fail hard.”

The Emcee, immortalized by Joel Grey in the original Broadway production and the 1972 film, weaves in and out of “Cabaret” with tunes that tacitly comment on the plot without affecting it. When Redmayne’s Emcee rises from the stage for the opening number “Willkommen,” in a clownish get-up with a party hat askew, he fits the bill as the quirky crowd-pleaser with a mischievous edge.

Less sly than Grey’s iconic Emcee, and not as sensual as Alan Cumming’s renowned take, this interpretation is more of an audience-ribbing fiend. But as Redmayne croaks and contorts his way through the physically taxing performance — the 42-year-old says vitamin drips, B12 shots and a “shedload of water” help him traverse eight shows a week — Nazism’s shadow creeps into the club, and the impish entertainer morphs into something more sinister.

“It was intriguing to me,” Redmayne says, “that those people that perhaps you don’t take seriously can then shape-shift their way into being something that is serious and is quite dangerous.”

Sally’s cry in the dark

If the Emcee is an eerie abstraction, Sally is the show’s beating heart. In playing the English cabaret singer, who shacks up with closeted American writer Clifford Bradshaw (Ato Blankson-Wood) after losing her job and her housing, Rankin eschews the toast of Mayfair’s usual pluck and plays up the unmoored mentality of a woman on the ropes. Although the choice rubbed some critics the wrong way, Rankin’s supporters — including lawyer Meena Harris, who defended the show in a widely circulated Variety op-ed — connected with her intent.

“There’s a lot of room for interpretation, and there also is a real risk of misunderstanding,” says Rankin, a 34-year-old known for the TV series “Perry Mason” and “GLOW.” “I think, as a performer, you really have to offer something to these parts because they’ll take it. They’ll absorb it.”

The celebrated Mendes production famously heightened the show’s gut punch of an ending by having Cumming’s Emcee strip to reveal a concentration camp uniform. “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” takes a decidedly different tack: Redmayne’s Emcee adapts and endures, and it’s the diverse ensemble of Kit Kat boys and girls that’s forced into doomed conformity.

“Productions often land on the tragedy of the Emcee, which works really successfully,” Frecknall says. “But I was interested in actually getting to the end and it being the ensemble’s tragedy. You know, Eddie would have been okay. Eddie is a cis, White, beautiful Aryan man. I thought it was interesting just really acknowledging that and going, ‘Actually, you would walk out of this and these people wouldn’t.’”

The revival even goes as far as to paint the Emcee as a merchant of death, happy to evolve, assimilate and perpetrate fascism in the name of his own survival. Inhabited by Redmayne with the slippery physicality of a living marionette, this Emcee has no qualms about functioning as a Nazi-enabling puppet.

“Individuality was stripped away as fascism rose and people had to become more homogenized,” Redmayne says of the Weimar Republic’s decline. “So the idea, therefore, of our Emcee as being puppeteer, conductor, perpetrator — rather than the version of the Emcee as a victim — was important.”

Early signs indicate “Cabaret” will be a financial success, despite high operating costs and a reported capitalization of around $25 million: The show is selling out performance after performance and outpacing every other new production at the box office. Still, the polarized reviews took Broadway by surprise after the Frecknall-directed West End version — starring Redmayne and Jessie Buckley — opened in 2021 to rapturous acclaim and won seven Olivier Awards.

But as the Emcee says, the Kit Kat Club is where people come to leave their troubles outside. To Redmayne, his decision to avoid the critical discussion altogether is about keeping such noise out of the theater.

“It’s my job in those opening moments to try and draw in an audience and make them have the time of their life — and that involves confidence,” Redmayne says. “When one reads reviews, of course, there are going to be people who don’t agree with what you’ve done, in the same way that, hopefully, there are people that do enjoy what you do.”

Chuckling at his own anxieties, he adds: “But I am not inherently a particularly confident person, and it is important to me that I try to keep that [confidence] in order to serve the role honestly.”

It’s a sentiment Rankin echoes. “I don’t really worry about people being catty or mean,” she says. “But I do care about just being respectful and honoring [the show].”

Frecknall notes that any production will have its detractors, and emphasizes her job as the director of a revival: “It’s not to repeat, it’s not to remount — it’s to revive.” When the piece is a political live wire about the perils of complacency, she points out, discomfort comes with the territory.

“You’re not trying to please people,” Frecknall says. “You’re trying to provoke people. Obviously, you want people to have a great time and be moved, but it’s not a safe piece of theater — and it shouldn’t be.”