Eddie Redmayne had never seen “Cabaret” when, as a 15-year-old student at Eton, he was first cast as the Emcee, the indecorous impresario of the bawdy Berlin nightclub where the musical is set. So Redmayne did what anyone wondering about the character would do: He watched the 1972 film, and studied Joel Grey’s performance.

Redmayne, 42, has played the Emcee three more times — at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe following high school; in London’s West End, winning an Olivier Award in 2022; and now on Broadway, where he has just picked up a Tony nomination.

“Cabaret,” set in 1929 and 1930, is about an American writer who has a relationship with a British singer working at the Kit Kat Club; the queerness of some of that nightclub’s habitués and the Jewishness of some of its neighbors become risk factors as the Nazis gain power.

Redmayne had never met Grey, who originated the role on Broadway in 1966 and who went on to win both Tony and Academy Awards as the Emcee. So I asked them to lunch, to talk about a character both have played several times, and about a musical that has continued to move audiences.

We met at Le Bernardin — Grey’s choice — and for two hours they shared stories, Redmayne reverential and thoughtful, Grey puckish and supportive. At times, when words seemed insufficient, Grey reached out to clasp Redmayne’s hand.

Although the lunch was the first time Redmayne and Grey had had a real conversation, they had greeted each other a few days earlier, on Grey’s 92nd birthday, when the actor, accompanied by his actress-daughter, Jennifer, attended a “Cabaret” performance; as the two arrived, the starry crowd (including the musical’s 97-year-old composer, John Kander) rose to its feet.

At curtain, Redmayne, who also has an Oscar and a Tony (for “The Theory of Everything” and “Red”), paid an emotional tribute to Grey’s performance as an inspiration for his career, led the crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” and presented Grey with a pineapple-shaped cake (pineapple, as a treasured fruit, is the subject of a “Cabaret” song).

There was no pineapple at our lunch, but there were other delights (Grey turns out to be partial to sea urchin).

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

EDDIE REDMAYNE: My family have just left. I don’t know how you found it, Joel, but I have two young children, and we always thought we would travel together and do everything together, but they’ve just started new schools in London.

MICHAEL PAULSON: They’re too young to see “Cabaret,” right?

REDMAYNE: They are, in theory. How old were yours when they saw it?

JOEL GREY: Jennifer was glued to the proscenium arch. She would go with me to every matinee.

REDMAYNE: This is wonderful, because my kids have been singing the music for years. It’s so inappropriate!

PAULSON: Do you explain anything?

REDMAYNE: They’ve seen little snippets of numbers. My wife thinks it would go over their head and they would just like to see it. But my fear is more for the patrons. “There’s a 7-year-old and a 6-year-old here?”

PAULSON: So you guys had not met before last Thursday?

REDMAYNE: This is pretty much our first time of meeting proper. It’s very surreal to be doing it in recorded company. My first interaction with Joel was on our opening in London, and I opened a card from him, and I’ll never forget that moment. That coupled with the other evening, when I knew Joel was in, but I didn’t know where he was sitting, and we caught each other’s eye, and Joel went like this to me [puts his hands over his heart, and then reaches out] and I’ll never, ever forget that moment.
Continue reading  »

Redmayne tells IndieWire about life behind the scenes of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” where he reprises his West End role as The Emcee for Broadway.

Life’s not all a cabaret for film actors making their way to Broadway.

In the case of Eddie Redmayne, who now stars as the ghoul-like and flamboyant Emcee in director Rebecca Frecknall’s “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” at New York’s August Wilson Theatre, life behind the scenes is more “monastic,” as he told IndieWire, than song-and-dance bacchanalia.

“When you’re doing a musical like this, it’s quite monastic living, and it’s almost more like being an athlete than an actor sometimes because when you’re doing eight shows a week, you’re keeping your voice in decent nick,” said Redmayne, Zooming from the backseat of a car between appointments, which just included lunch with Joel Grey, who famously starred as the Master of Ceremonies in Bob Fosse‘s Oscar-winning 1972 film.

“It’s quite a physical role,” said Redmayne, who first played The Emcee on the West End in 2022, earning a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. In this just-opened Broadway version, Redmayne sings and dances in gender-bending garb, impishly contorting himself on a 360-degree stage opposite Gayle Rankin as alcoholic cabaret ingénue Sally Bowles.

“I wish I could say I was out living a hedonistic Broadway existence, but actually, you are drinking a ton of water,” Redmayne said. “I haven’t got a huge amount of experience in musicals. I listen to all of our musical theater actors in the piece who give me tips on which voice lozenges to use, and apparently, Lay’s chips, like the oil and the salt in that, [are] very good for keeping your voice moist, and these random Chinese medicines that are good. So I take any piece of advice I can to try and keep me upright basically.”

Redmayne made his Broadway debut with the play “Red” opposite Alfred Molina, earning a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2010. But Redmayne’s musical acumen is limited to the movie “Les Misérables” (he openly called his own musical performance in the film “appallingly sung,” technically speaking) and now “Cabaret.” He displays considerable pipes in this splashy stage show, singing lyrics by Fred Ebb and music by John Kander from the 1960s musical.
Continue reading  »

When I was 15 years old, I saw Cabaret for the first time, at a community theater in northeast Ohio. Though I considered myself sophisticated in important ways (I recall that I was wearing a wide-leg Donna Karan bodysuit that evening), my experience as a theatergoer was then limited to The Sound of Music and Ice Capades: Let’s Celebrate. I wonder if my parents, who had season tickets to the theater, knew that the show wasn’t exactly “family” entertainment. Set in 1931 Berlin as it careens toward the abyss, Cabaret depicts alternating stories. There’s the doomed romance between a fledgling novelist named Clifford Bradshaw and a young singer of supreme charisma (and mediocre talent) named Sally Bowles. And then there’s the seedy nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, which is populated with a highly sexualized cast of misfits and overseen by a ghoulish Master of Ceremonies. The show’s ethos—the glamour and terror, the irreverence, the campiness, the unreality—shaped my taste forever, and I knew that I had just experienced one of the greatest works of art ever created. I would never look at theater, or life, in the same way again.

Over three decades later, I’ve seen more stage productions of Cabaret than any other show, including a revival starring the original Emcee, Joel Grey; I’ve seen the Bob Fosse film version over 50 times. I’ve pretty much always got one of Fred Ebb’s sardonic lyrics jangling around in my head. Today, it’s “You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein Herr,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Youthful exposure to Cabaret also turned out to be a life-changing event for the star of the new production opening this month on Broadway, Eddie Redmayne. “Weirdly, when I was 15, it was the first thing that made me believe in this whole process,” he says. Redmayne was a student at Eton when he first played the Emcee; he had never seen Cabaret when he was cast. On this late-autumn evening, Redmayne is speaking to me from Budapest, where he is shooting a TV series. “It reaffirmed my love for the theater,” he says of his first experience. “It made me believe that this profession, were I ever to have the opportunity to pursue it, was something that I wanted to do.”

Now, as he prepares for the transfer of the smash-hit 2021 London production of Cabaret (in which he also starred), Redmayne is reflecting on the power and durability of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece. “The show was just so intriguing and intoxicating,” he says, adding that the character of the Emcee posed many questions when he portrayed him for the first time, but provided scant answers. A few years later, when he was an art-history student at Cambridge, he again tackled the part of the Emcee at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At a dingy performance space called the Underbelly, he did two shows a night, the audiences getting rowdier and more intoxicated throughout the evening. He’d get up the following afternoon and stand along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile handing out flyers for the show, dressed in latex. “There was just a sort of general debauchery that lived in the experience,” he says. When his parents came one night, they were alarmed to find that their son had turned into a “pale, lacking-in-vitamin-D skeleton.”
Continue reading  »

As BroadwayWorld previously reported, Cabaret is soon coming back to Broadway. Fans need not wait until 2024 to get a taste of Rebecca Frecknall’s electrifying new production, however. You can come hear the music play alone in your room today!

The original London revival cast, led by Olivier Award winners Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckely, was captured live for the 2021 London Cast Recording, which is available to stream and purchase today!

This unique production of Cabaret opened in December 2021 to critical and audience acclaim, widely praised as the ultimate theatrical experience. In April 2022 the production won a record-breaking seven Olivier Awards, the most for any musical revival in Olivier history.

Below, BroadwayWorld’s very own Richard Ridge checks in with Redmayne to discuss the epic role, and the thrill of listening to the acclaimed production as it was recorded live at the Kit Kat Club.

I am so thrilled that you enjoyed it! When we put together this production, it was in the round, the audience was woven into the entire piece and their presence was everything. Recording it live and getting a sense of that atmosphere [was critical], particularly as the Emcee, in which everything is in response. One of the things I found extraordinary while prepping to play the character was that it’s only when you have an audience that the other character is in the room. We recorded this right towards the end of our run, and by that point, every night was different. Had it been recorded on a different night, I bet it would be a completely different feel.

I love that it was recorded later in the run. It adds that extra little bit of everyone finding their characters. It’s electric. And listening to it makes you feel like you are performing right there in our living rooms.

One of the joys of doing something for an extended period as an actor is getting to mine new things and find new things. Audiences are morphous beasts! They change every night. Particularly with this production, we would have people wearing black tie and tuxedos, then other people in fetish gear sitting alongside each other. It was a very inclusive audience filled with often very charismatic people. It gave us so much room to play. Every night felt vibrantly alive. It was important for us to try to register that for the recording.
Continue reading  »

The Oscar winner on learning from his mistakes, his latest role as a serial killer nurse – and why he’s not wearing a wedding ring

Drinking coffee in the restaurant of a central London hotel as jazz burbles away in the background, Eddie Redmayne is wearing faded blue jeans, a white sweatshirt and a scarf. No wedding band, though. Uh-oh. “‘Spotted without his ring!’” he says, mock-horrified. He misplaced it while shooting The Danish Girl eight years ago, which is only one of the reasons to lament that film. We’ll get to the others in good time.

He bought a replacement ring then lost that, too, so he gave up. On jewellery, that is, not marriage. “I am incredibly happily married so I’m afraid there’s no scoop there,” he says apologetically. The tone fits with his demeanour, which is that of a Saturday boy at John Lewis: posh, affable, sincerely regretful that he doesn’t have the item in your size. He just turned 41 but could pass for mid-20s. His tousled hair is rust-coloured, his skin frantic with freckles, his lips so plump they look like crimson jellies.

A scarf stays knotted around his neck throughout our morning together; he picked up a nasty cold on his recent trip to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where he was in the running for best supporting actor for playing the serial killer Charles Cullen in The Good Nurse. When the sneezes come today, he whips out a comically large red handkerchief peppered with white dots, like a magician preparing to make the crockery vanish.

In fact, his party trick is quite the opposite: he makes awards appear. He got the big three (Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe) for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, and an Olivier last year for his lizardly, mercurial Emcee in Cabaret, which also starred Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles. A soundtrack recording, taped during live performances for added wildness, has just been released. Redmayne’s approach to the character, he says, “is that he would shape-shift and emerge as this Aryan conductor who could drop his baton in one of the champagne bottles at the end, and then walk off into the night. Whatever else is going on, he’s fucking fine.”
Continue reading  »