![]() The idea of adapting Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin into a musical had been floating around for some time, when Joe Masteroff – as book writer – and Kander and Ebb came on board. The truth is that when Cabaret premiered on Broadway in 1966, it was already bold enough. “Whether or not to put the whole show in the Kit Kat club was something that was discussed when we wrote it,” he says (the original Cabaret has two areas of stage space, one for “real life”, one for the club). But Kander, now 94 and – talking from his home in Accord, New York, where he lives with his husband, Albert Stephenson – doing an impression of a sprightly 75-year-old, is leaning forward, nodding. She pauses and laughs, as she considers the fact that she’s discussing her ideas for staging Cabaret in front of one of the people who created it. You’re not looking into a picture of a room from another time.” There are so many colours in the work and people will interpret it in different ways. The audience is very present with the actors and you are able to pull out more contemporary threads. What’s interesting about working in this space in the round is that it is so immediate. “There is something about a proscenium arch that is tricky because you can feel that you are looking through a view-finder. On Zoom, she looks tired – it’s the day before the dress rehearsal – but her enthusiasm for the show and the staging is infectious. She is only the second woman to direct a major production of Cabaret. ![]() ![]() It was Redmayne’s star power and persistence that helped assemble the team that has now rebuilt and reshaped the Playhouse theatre in London’s West End into a version of the Kit Kat club, the setting in Weimar Berlin for Cabaret’s dark story of dreams and desire in the shadow of the Nazis’ rise to power.īut it is Frecknall, who won such acclaim for her radical production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, who is now driving the piece on to the stage. ![]()
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