For Tom Scutt, Cabaret’s brilliant costume and set designer, the project of reconfiguring a 100-year-old Broadway theater to evoke a seedy nightclub in Jazz Age Berlin was as appealingly complex as the text of the show itself. “We have this piece that comes from the ’60s and talks about artists and marginalized people in the ’20s,” he notes. (The first New York production, based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, opened in the fall of 1966.) “You feel like you’re having a conversation with history in some way. And so the building and the design of the building reflect that: It has modernity, but it also has nostalgia. And I think it’s about how we can continue carrying the torch of these themes and these stories.”
Not long after Ben Platt and his fiancé, Noah Galvin, sliced through the crowd to find their seats in the theater proper, the rest of the group followed, filing down the stairs to the orchestra level. Then came the show itself: two hours and 45 minutes of late Weimar-era debauchery, punctuated by some of the most iconic songs in all of musical theater (among them “Willkommen,” “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time,” and “Cabaret”). Also, some truly seamless stagecraft: When, shortly after “Don’t Tell Mama,” a member of the ensemble had to duck out of the show, Cabaret’s crack hair and makeup team had a swing, Hannah Florence, ready to go at a moment’s notice—sending her out right on time for the next number. (If not for the announcement during intermission of a change in the evening’s casting, the rest of us would have been none the wiser.)
Indeed, proceedings were so rousing that when, shortly before the start of Act II, members of the audience were invited to do a little jig on stage, Kravitz couldn’t resist getting up and joining in.
Needless to say, the audience was on its feet by the final scene—and when a small group convened in the Red Bar, at the rear of the orchestra, for a meet and greet with the stars, the excitement was palpable—even eliciting a few shrieks of delight when Redmayne and Rankin came out. So, how is the show feeling to them now, in the final countdown to opening night? “I think we’re—shockingly—feeling really ready,” Rankin says, the platinum bob that she sports as Sally Bowles tucked neatly behind her ears. “It’s an emotional show, but I feel like everyone has each other’s back, which is really rare and nice.” The audience is another asset, per Redmayne, who has traded the Emcee’s madcap wardrobe—a dingy tank top and leather shorts; a crazy clown costume; a terrifyingly severe three-piece suit—for an off-the-shoulder top and black trousers. In that role, he explains, “the other character in the scenes with you is the audience. And every night, we are getting the most thrilling, different, but engaged audiences, and it’s fueling me in the most exciting way. And I feel that because the idea with the production is that once you pass the threshold, you get discombobulated and taken down into these cavernous bars, hopefully you really do leave all your troubles outside on 52nd Street, and by the time you arrive in here, you can get seduced by the world of it.”
