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Eddie Redmayne and Gayle Rankin will headline the latest Broadway revival of the classic musical Cabaret this spring, the show's producers announced today. Redmayne will play the sinister Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, a decadent Berlin nightclub in 1930s Germany as Naziism begins its rise; Rankin will be Sally Bowles, a chanteuse at the club who is bent on stardom at any cost.
Adapted by Joe Masteroff from stories by Christopher Isherwood and a play by John Van Druten, and built around songs by the Chicago team of John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret is one of the great Broadway musicals of all time: an exhilarating, harrowing masterpiece. This new revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, originated in the West End in 2021—with Redmayne as the Emceee—and went on to win seven Olivier Awards, London's equivalent of the Tonys. (It is still playing there.) In its New York incarnation, titled Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, the production will be staged in the round at the August Wilson Theatre, which will be remodeled to allow for an immersive pre-show experience that includes dining and entertainment.
Sam Mendes and Rob Marshall's superb 1998 revival of Cabaret ran for six years and made a star of Alan Cumming, who reprised his role as the Emcee when the production returned in 2014. Frecknall's version aims to stake its own claim to the material, with help from designer Tom Scutt. "The costumes are angular, vivid, somewhat grotesque; the performers’ faces are sardonic, or sinister, not submissive or lusty," wrote Andrzej Lukowski in his Time Out review of the 2021 London production. "There is an alien harshness and a sense of confrontation and mischief, a feeling we have left the world behind: You really can picture this place as a strange nocturnal bubble removed from the increasingly grim realities of the Germany outside."
Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club will mark Redmayne's return to Broadway for the first time since 2010's Red, which earned him at Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play. Since then, of course, he has gone on to significant film success, including an Oscar-winning performance as Stephen Hawking in 2014's The Theory of Everything. The Scottish Rankin is familiar to theater fans for her numerous excellent performances on the New York stage, including in Tribes, The Mystery of Love and Sex, Hamlet—as Ophelia to Oscar Isaac's prince—and the last Broadway revival of Cabaret, in which she played not Sally but the chilling Fräulein Kost. Her film and TV credits include The Climb, Glow, The Kindred and the upcoming second season of House of the Dragon.
Previews for Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club will begin on April 1, 2024, with the official press opening on April 21. Redmayne and Rankin are scheduled to remain in the production through August 31. Tickets go on sale on October 25, 2023, for American Express cardholders; general sales begin on November 2. You can buy tickets here, and find out more here about "upgrade packages" that include food and drinks.
