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 »