Once I was 15 years previous, I noticed Cabaret for the primary time, at a group theater in northeast Ohio. Although I thought-about myself refined in necessary methods (I recall that I used to be sporting a wide-leg Donna Karan bodysuit that night), my expertise as a theatergoer was then restricted to The Sound of Music and Ice Capades: Let’s Rejoice. I ponder if my dad and mom, who had season tickets to the theater, knew that the present wasn’t precisely “household” leisure. Set in 1931 Berlin because it careens towards the abyss, Cabaret depicts alternating tales. There’s the doomed romance between a fledgling novelist named Clifford Bradshaw and a younger singer of supreme charisma (and mediocre expertise) named Sally Bowles. After which there’s the seedy nightclub, the Package Kat Membership, which is populated with a extremely sexualized forged of misfits and overseen by a ghoulish Grasp of Ceremonies. The present’s ethos—the glamour and terror, the irreverence, the campiness, the unreality—formed my style eternally, and I knew that I had simply skilled one of many biggest artistic endeavors ever created. I’d by no means have a look at theater, or life, in the identical approach once more.

Over three many years later, I’ve seen extra stage productions of Cabaret than every other present, together with a revival starring the unique Emcee, Joel Gray; I’ve seen the Bob Fosse movie model over 50 occasions. I’ve just about all the time acquired one in all Fred Ebb’s sardonic lyrics jangling round in my head. Right now, it’s “You’ll by no means flip the vinegar to jam, mein Herr,” and I couldn’t agree extra.

Youthful publicity to Cabaret additionally turned out to be a life-changing occasion for the star of the brand new manufacturing opening this month on Broadway, Eddie Redmayne. “Weirdly, after I was 15, it was the very first thing that made me imagine on this complete course of,” he says. Redmayne was a scholar at Eton when he first performed the Emcee; he had by no means seen Cabaret when he was forged. On this late-autumn night, Redmayne is talking to me from Budapest, the place he’s taking pictures a TV collection. “It reaffirmed my love for the theater,” he says of his first expertise. “It made me imagine that this career, have been I ever to have the chance to pursue it, was one thing that I wished to do.”

Now, as he prepares for the switch of the smash-hit 2021 London manufacturing of Cabaret (wherein he additionally starred), Redmayne is reflecting on the ability and sturdiness of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece. “The present was simply so intriguing and intoxicating,” he says, including that the character of the Emcee posed many questions when he portrayed him for the primary time, however offered scant solutions. A number of years later, when he was an art-history scholar at Cambridge, he once more tackled the a part of the Emcee on the Edinburgh Pageant Fringe. At a dingy efficiency house known as the Underbelly, he did two reveals an evening, the audiences getting rowdier and extra intoxicated all through the night. He’d rise up the next afternoon and stand alongside Edinburgh’s Royal Mile handing out flyers for the present, wearing latex. “There was only a form of basic debauchery that lived within the expertise,” he says. When his dad and mom got here one night time, they have been alarmed to seek out that their son had become a “pale, lacking-in-vitamin-D skeleton.”

Flash ahead 15 years. The Underbelly cofounders and administrators, Charlie Wooden and Ed Bartlam, would method Redmayne—now with an Academy Award for The Idea of The whole lot and a Tony for Purple beneath his belt—with the thought of once more taking part in the Emcee. Redmayne was desirous to return to the function, however many questions remained—principally, who may direct it. In 2019 he occurred to have been seated in entrance of the visionary younger director Rebecca Frecknall on the final efficiency of her West Finish manufacturing of Tennessee Williams’s Summer season and Smoke. It was an emotional night for Frecknall, who’d been engaged on the mission on and off for a decade. She and Redmayne have been launched, however “I had mascara down my face and possibly didn’t make a really coherent first impression,” she tells me from London, the place her new present, The Home of Bernarda Alba, has simply opened on the Nationwide Theatre.

Redmayne was astonished by the depth and delicacy of understanding that Frecknall dropped at Summer season and Smoke, a romance with the basic Williams themes of loneliness, self-delusion, and unrequited love. A number of months later, Redmayne requested Frecknall if she’d think about directing a revival of Cabaret. “I stated, ‘In fact I’ll do it, however you’ll by no means get the rights,’ ” she recollects. These rights have been held up with one other manufacturing however have been shortly thereafter launched, and Frecknall went to work assembling her artistic crew—amongst them musical supervisor Jennifer Whyte, choreographer Julia Cheng, and set and costume designer Tom Scutt. Frecknall’s transcendent manufacturing of Cabaret opened on the West Finish on the tail finish of the pandemic and succeeded in reinventing the present anew, successful seven Olivier Awards, together with one for Redmayne and one for Frecknall as greatest director.

When Cabaret begins its run in April on the August Wilson Theatre, starring Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ato Blankson-​Wooden, will probably be simply the second main manufacturing of the present directed by a girl. (Gillian Lynne directed the 1986 London revival.) In Frecknall’s model, Sally emerges because the beating coronary heart of the present. “I discover that the majority of my work has a feminine protagonist,” says Frecknall, who has additionally directed radical new interpretations of A Avenue­automotive Named Want, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Romeo and Juliet. “And I’ve a distinct connection to Sally,” she says. “I used to be actually drawn to how younger she was…and the way she makes use of that sexuality and the way different individuals prey on that as effectively.” The function of Sally Bowles, originated on this manufacturing by Jessie Buckley, who additionally gained an Olivier for her efficiency, can be performed this spring by the good Scottish actor Gayle Rankin.