[MUSIC]

Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. In the Tony nominated revival of Cabaret, The August Wilson Theater has been completely transformed into the Weimar Germany Kit Kat Klub. Entering through an alley, you emerge into a space full of dancers, musicians, drinks and debauchery, and that's all before the musical even begins. It's a way to put the audience in the right mood and also to implicate us in what's to come.

Playing the iconic role of the Emcee is Tony nominee Eddie Redmayne, who contorts his body and his voice to become a strange creature of hedonism and fun, but with a dark edge. He guides us through the story of Sally Bowles, played by Tony nominee Gayle Rankin. The British cabaret singer thinks her life might be on the upswing after meeting an American writer named Cliff, but with Nazism on the rise, the time for carefree revelry is soon coming to an end, whether Sally wants to admit it or not.

Longtime fans and newcomers to Cabaret are both going to find something to delight them and surprise them in this new version of the show. It's directed by Rebecca Frecknall, and it's been nominated for nine Tonies, including Best Musical Revival. When Rebecca joined me on the show last month to talk about it, along with stars Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin. I started by asking Rebecca why now, 2024 feels like a good time for a Cabaret revival.

Rebecca Frecknall: I think it just feels like such an exciting and urgent and vital piece of work. I think every time I come back to this story, I'm shocked at how relevant and resonant it is. To bring it over here and do it again on Broadway feels so exciting because it's such an iconic piece of American musical theater history and legacy. But also, doing it today in our current political climate feels really exciting. To do it with Eddie and Gayle has just given it a completely new lease of life, so yes, it's an exciting revival.

Kousha Navidar: So iconic. I think that word sticks out to me. Gayle, I wonder for you, what was your first exposure to Cabaret? When did you know Sally Bowles was a role you might want to play?

Gayle Rankin: Actually, I went to a musical theater high school when I was like 15 and 16. I do remember I'd never seen the film and one of the girls in the class above me was assigned the song maybe this time. I do remember just listening to her sing that song and there was a really great sense of longing. I was, "Oh, I'm never going to get to sing that song," [laughter] and it was really sad. But there's something also very, very, very deeply Sally about that feeling and that longing and that hope.

I do think that something quite early on in me felt very attached umbilically to that character in a sense of really tender longing. Her name was Claire and she was amazing.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Did that idea stick with you even after high school? Was Sally always on your radar to play?

Gayle Rankin: No. No. She kind of went away. I think I probably put her away because it's something so epic to hold inside of you, I think. It's big. When it came across my proverbial desk, I was very afraid, very afraid to risk wanting it. But I took the leap and it was such a humane and life-changing process to go on this journey with Rebecca and with Eddie and I'm so glad I did risk.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, it's such an interesting comparison to Eddie, I believe your first exposure to Cabaret because you first tackled the role of the Emcee when you were a kid. Is that right?

Eddie Redmayne: That is, as strange as it sounds. I think I was about 14 or 15 and we did it at school and I didn't know the show. I watched the film and I was completely blown away by it. Ever since, I've been a massive Cabaret fan. I obviously saw Joel Gray's performance in the movie and went and saw Alan Cumming's version with Emma Stone, which Gayle was also in here a decade ago on Broadway.

There's something about the character of the Emcee that he doesn't exist in Isherwood's book that Cabaret is based on. He was a creation by Harold Prince, the director and Joel Grey. There's this abstract quality to him that is so riveting for actors, I think because he's impossible to pin down really. The thing about theater is you go and you do it every night for a long period of time. The joy for us as actors is you're always looking to pin that thing down with the acknowledgement that you never will. Of all characters that I've ever played, I find him the most enigmatic and that's what's so thrilling.

Kousha Navidar: It's interesting that you bring up the word enigmatic because I saw the show last Friday. It was such a joy to come see it. While I was watching your performance, I was wondering how you considered the Emcee as either a person or as a symbol or as a metaphor or something else. Do any of those labels fit for you? Is it all of them? Is it one more than the others?

Eddie Redmayne: Well, it was in discussion with Rebecca really and Tom Scott, our designer. One of the ideas we liked was that he's almost conjured the evening. The set has a beautiful simplicity to it, almost of a music box or a toy box. He brings these characters in and it's almost like he's the puppeteer to begin with. Across the evening, he shape shifts his way. Every time he comes on stage, he looks different, whether it's a pyro, a clown or there's a skeletal figure, or towards the end, just a suited Aryan.

The idea that he goes from puppeteer to conductor as the fascism creeps into the piece. That was something that we were looking for, but that it manifests itself in shifts that you were saying earlier, in voice and physicality. We played into the abstraction of him, I think.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. Well, first listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the Broadway revival of Cabaret. We're very lucky to be in studio right now with Eddie Redmayne, who you just heard, who's the Tony nominee, the Emcee, Gayle Rankin, Tony nominee, Sally Bowles playing, and Rebecca Frecknall, who has guided this entire beautiful piece of work. I'm so happy that you brought up this set, Eddie, because Rebecca, I'm wondering for you, how early on in the process did you know you wanted this to be an immersive theater experience, that you really wanted to transform the place into the Kit Kat Klub?

Rebecca Frecknall: I think when Eddie and I first talked about doing it maybe four or five years ago now, [laughter] a long time ago, there was a real desire for the audience coming to not feel they're coming to the theater and to not feel that they're coming to, at the time, a West End show and now a Broadway show. Because we were really keen to create something that people who are maybe not traditional theatergoers or feel like theater is not for them or feel intimidated by that could come and experience the piece in a slightly different way.

We were first of all talking about found spaces or real club spaces or what we could do. Then actually, this was the one production where the pandemic actually worked in our favor I think because The Playhouse Theater in London ended up standing empty for a couple of years over that time and so The Playhouse became our site that we could respond to and we could change. In coming here, we had to make sure we could find a venue that was happy to go on that same journey with us. We were incredibly lucky that the people at The Wilson and Jordan Roth were excited to have us reimagine it there for that space because I think Cabaret is so much about the complicity of the audience.

What's clever in the writing is that the audience go from partygoers to voyeurs to participants in the political arc of it. If you are sitting looking at a proscenium arch, it's very easy to detach from that. But if you've been on a journey through a building and met the characters and sat in a circle around them and had them come and talk to you, you are in the show, you're a character in the show.

Kousha Navidar: Is that part of the reason why you made that choice to have the audience in the round kind of, all enveloping the actors?

Rebecca Frecknall: Yes. In the original Broadway production that Joel did, the set had a mirror in the back wall, which then you see again in the film. It's doing this thing of showing the audience themselves and showing us mob complicity and mob mentality and what that means. There's a song, an iconic song, that the iconic Bebe Neuwirth sings in the show called What Would You Do, and it's a direct question to the audience. It's nonjudgmental, it's an open question, but it hopefully provokes some thinking.

I suppose working in the round is our interpretation of that mirror, because you can see the audience on the side. Every time you are looking at a picture, the audience is behind, or whatever angle you are looking at, and we can play with having them disappear or become center stage. That's been the exciting thing about working in the round.

Kousha Navidar: Eddie, what does that add for you of having that audience in the round and it being surrounded on all sides?

Eddie Redmayne: It's amazing. The interesting thing for- -the Emcee, the other character in the scene with him is the audience, and that shifts and changes every night. The audiences that have come here in New York have been so passionate. What's extraordinary about the evening is you get people dressed in black tie sitting next to people in fetish gear, next to people in jeans and a t-shirt. For me, interacting with people from different walks of life who are finding different things funny, who are finding different things moving, it's live theater in its most essential form. Of course, that's why actors, we love doing it.

Kousha Navidar: I wanted to talk about the Emcee's character a little bit in depth, maybe hear a little bit about it. Eddie, I was struck, and you mentioned this before, about how physical your performance is. You're really contorting your body. You used puppeteer, and it's interesting because it looked like you were a marionette at some points. How did you arrive at that physicality for the performance?

Eddie Redmayne: It was a dialogue really with Rebecca and Julia, our choreographer. I'm not a great dancer, but--

Gayle Rankin: You are a great dancer.

Rebecca Frecknall: Not true.

[laughter]

Eddie Redmayne: Frecks comes from a movement background as well and so we just started very early, didn't we? We had four months of just workshops, and Julia, our choreographer, brought the physicality out of me really. There were so many interesting places. It's such a rich period to look into. There's an amazing dancer called Mary Wigman, who's worth looking up on YouTube, she did a dance called The Witch Dance, which I found very thrilling, and compelling, and terrifying in equal measure.

Actually, even here in this city, the Neue Galerie in New York has all those amazing Egon Schiele drawings and the way his hands were. He depicts hands and some of those bodies. It felt very much of that moment. There was a bit of that and there was a bit of clowning. There's this school in Paris called Lecoq, which is a physical theater school. I went and did a course there before Frecks and I started working on the theater of the absurd, and it was lots of mask work and all these things. It was lovely to put all of that in the sort of cauldron, I suppose, mix all that around, and then under the guidance of Rebecca and Julia, find a way through him.

Kousha Navidar: Eddie, for you, you did this show in London on the West End a few years ago. I was wondering, have you noticed a difference in audience reception at this particular moment in time?

Eddie Redmayne: I think the audience reception shifts nightly. We were talking about, actually, before we came in here from moment to moment. It's a very odd thing being an actor because you get to see how groups of people respond and what the ripple through can be. What I find extraordinary about Kander, Ebb and Masteroff's piece is it's so razor sharp and specific to the period it was written about, but it also then, of course, sung to the moment it was written in, in the '60s, 20 years after the end of the war. When it was then redone in the '90s, in the Sam Mendes production, there was a war going on in Eastern Europe, and it felt very pertinent then, and it feels extraordinarily relevant now.

I think that it's a testament to the piece that it has that specificity of the period, but it can also be read as rippling across generations, and the sadness that we perhaps haven't learned from our mistakes. I think John Kander puts it beautifully that he hopes that it will stop being relevant is the point.

Kousha Navidar: That was my conversation about the nine-time Tony-nominated revival of Cabaret with stars, Eddie Redmayne, and Gayle Rankin, along with director, Rebecca Frecknall. Up next, we'll hear about Hell's Kitchen. It's a musical loosely based on the story of Alicia Keys' childhood just off Times Square, featuring new arrangements of some of her beloved hits and some new original music she's written. Three members of the show's creative team will talk about it. There's writer, Kristoffer Diaz, director, Michael Greif, and music supervisor, Adam Blackstone. That's coming up next. This is All Of It.

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