Frecknall, Rebecca

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      ‘Cabaret,’ Starring Eddie Redmayne, Sweeps Olivier Awards

      by

      The musical won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys. A puppet-filled adaptation of “Life of Pi” and a “Back to the Future” musical also won big.LONDON — A revival of “Cabaret” that has been the talk of London’s theater world since opening in December, on Sunday swept the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.Starring Eddie Redmayne in his first London role in a decade, “Cabaret” collected seven awards during a ceremony at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Its haul included best musical revival, best actor in a musical (Redmayne), best actress in a musical for Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles, and best director for Rebecca Frecknall.Britain’s newspaper reviewers sometimes struggled for superlatives to describe “Cabaret.” Nick Curtis, writing in The Evening Standard, summed it up with a simple: “Wow. Just wow.”Matt Wolf, reviewing the show for The New York Times, said that Frecknall had made a “remarkable entry into musical theater” after several lauded stage productions here, including of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” and Tennessee Williams’s “Summer and Smoke.” “Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors,” he added.The musical has gained as much attention for its staging as its performances, with audiences made to enter the Playhouse Theater through a side door, only to discover the building has been transformed to look like a 1920s Berlin nightclub. Ticketholders — some of whom criticized sky-high ticket prices — have to work their way through a labyrinth of corridors filled with dancers and drinks to get to their seats.Redmayne, center, as Master of Ceremonies with the company of “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerOf the actors in its original cast, Redmayne won particular plaudits. Arifa Akbar, writing in The Guardian, said he was “electric,” adding: “He gives an immense, physicalized performance, both muscular and delicate, from his curled limbs to his tautly expressive fingertips.”The other big winner on Sunday was “Life of Pi” at Wyndham’s Theater, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel about a zookeeper’s son who, after a shipping accident, is stuck on a lifeboat at sea with only animals for company. It took five awards including best new play and best actor for Hiran Abeysekera, as well as a crowd-pleasing best supporting actor award for the seven puppeteers who bring a 44-pound puppet tiger to life onstage. Hiran Abeysekera won best actor for “Life of Pi,” and a best supporting actor award went to the puppeteers who bring the tiger to life onstage.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images For SoltReviewers had often singled out those puppeteers for praise. Dominic Cavendish, writing in The Daily Telegraph, said they made the tiger exude “a watchful malevolence and innate magnificence,” as he “moves from brute prowling threat to personality in his own right.”Some other shows did manage to get prizes at the Oliviers. “Back to the Future: the Musical” at the Adelphi Theater, a show that has grabbed attention for its flying car as much as its songs, won best new musical, beating shows including “Get Up! Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical” and the London debut of “Frozen.”The best comedy play went to “Pride and Prejudice* (*sort of)” at the Criterion Theater, a fast and loose retelling of Jane Austen’s novel, which closed in February citing a lack of audiences returning to the West End.The other notable winner was a revival of “Constellations” by the Donmar Warehouse at the Vaudeville Theater, which took awards for best revival and best actress in a play for Sheila Atim. That 70-minute, one-act play, about a couple falling in and out of love, was a hit last summer as British theater came back to life after multiple lockdowns. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Theater

      Review: First the Party, Then the Crash, in a ‘Cabaret’ Revival

      by

      A London production starring Eddie Redmayne pulls the audience into a hedonistic milieu. Then things get dark.LONDON — At first glance, it looks as if there’s a party happening at the Kit Kat Club, the refurbished London venue where a nerve-shredding revival of “Cabaret,” starring Eddie Redmayne, opened last weekend.Entering a side door of what was once the Playhouse Theater, you snake your way along corridors not usually open to the public and into a labyrinthine demimonde of dancers and drinks: a recreation of a seedy, Weimar-era Berlin nightclub. The auditorium has lost 200 seats in its transformation into an immersive, plushly appointed space, complete with lamp-lit tables down front for a preshow meal. In the show’s hefty playbill, the brilliant designer Tom Scutt says he has tried to bring a “queer irreverence” to the venue, which rewards close inspection of its details, like a splash of gold here and an art-nouveau flourish there.Yet the director, Rebecca Frecknall, is more interested in disturbing the audience than handing them a drink. Making a remarkable entry into musical theater after lauded productions of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams, Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of life’s horrors.That’s as it should be given this 1966 musical by John Kander (music), Fred Ebb (lyrics) and Joe Masteroff (book) about “the end of the world,” to cite a final observation from Cliff (Omari Douglas), an American writer in 1930s Germany who is alone among the show’s principals in sensing the danger of the Nazis’ rise. Frecknall’s main accomplice in darkening the mood is her Oscar and Tony-winning leading man, Redmayne, returning to the London stage for the first time in a decade. And there’s further assistance from the Irish actress-singer Jessie Buckley, an unusually ferocious Sally Bowles.Redmayne’s Emcee brings his own distinctly shape-shifting, sinuous quality to a role that can be hard to refresh: Many still associate it with a pancake-faced Joel Grey, who originated the part onstage and won an Oscar in the 1972 Bob Fosse film. Limping or crouching his way about the circular stage, a twitchy Redmayne initially calls to mind a demented marionette, his mouth as misshapen as his psyche.He first emerges in a burst of light, his body contorted during the startling opening number, “Willkommen,” a party hat clinging to the side of his tilted head. “Life is beautiful,” he says, but something about the gravelly voice and glazed smile suggest otherwise. Appearing bare-chested soon after in the manic number “Two Ladies,” Redmayne’s Emcee is a devotee of debauchery whose true character is revealed in the antisemitic finish to “If You Could See Her,” when a nasty slur comes as the song’s brutal kicker.A dance number from “Cabaret.”Marc BrennerRedmayne’s lyric tenor lends itself well to “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” the melodic Nazi anthem that sounds sweet enough until you grasp the lyrics. The song prefigures a moral decline that reaches a nadir in the Emcee’s second-act solo, “I Don’t Care Much.” With that number, cut from the original production but reinstated for various revivals, the Emcee’s assimilation into the Third Reich is complete.Frecknall shows that such transformations passed many onlookers by — or that they were reluctant to take action while there was still time. The affair between the landlady Fraulein Schneider (the superb Liza Sadovy, in richly expressive voice) and the Jewish grocer, Herr Schultz (a likable Elliot Levey), is especially telling on this front. Fraulein Schneider sings in the wrenching “What Would You Do?” that she is too old and tired to counter “the storm” she sees approaching; Herr Schultz, meanwhile, is convinced that German citizenship will save him. But when the Emcee raises a champagne flute to the couple, we hear the cacophonous glass-shattering of Kristallnacht.Sally Bowles exists in a self-deluded class of her own: an English expat in Berlin who is heralded as “the toast of Mayfair,” but in Buckley’s take sometimes seems a scared and angry child. She sings “Maybe This Time” directly to Cliff, her lyrics about winning delivered quietly as if Sally were admitting to herself that her life has been a failure. And though she gives off the air of a thumb-sucking Shirley Temple when she first appears with “Don’t Tell Mama,” she roars the title number at the show’s climax full of fury and pain. “The party’s over,” Cliff says: The festivities have become a farewell, and a world is about to crash.CabaretAt the Kit Kat Club in London for an open-ended run; theplayhousetheatre.co.uk. More