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Marisha Wallace and Billy Porter in CABARET | Mickey-Jo's thoughts on the new West End revival cast...
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Mickey Jo
I felt pretty confident I knew exactly what to expect from both of these performances actually, but already by the interval I was completely surprised. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you are listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media as well as a pundit and a stagey content creator. And you may be wondering to yourself, Mickey Jo, why is a professional theatre critic appearing to me via video and wearing a dressing gown? And those are actually very perceptible questions. No, that's a very good point. And the answers to those questions are as first of all, I am not your traditional theatre critic. I make video reviews rather than written ones most of the time, although this is not explicitly a review. If you want to know everything that I think about this current revival of Cabaret playing both at the kit Kat Club aka the Playhouse Theatre in the West End and the KitKat Club aka the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway, you can go and check out those two distinct reviews that I did when each of those productions originally opened. It doesn't really make sense for me to go back and keep re reviewing the show every time they bring in new principal performers, which per the casting ethos of this show is actually every few months. So instead I make a little video talking about my experiences of going to see it again and just chat a little bit about their interpretations of the roles. And as far as the dressing gown goes, I don't own a Cabaret T shirt. What I do own is this Cabaret cast and crew dressing gown that I got at the Broadway flea market for a very affordable price, largely because Cabaret had not yet made it to New York and they didn't know what this logo meant. Long story short, hooray for me. So as the thumbnail and title of this video may suggest, we are today going to be discussing the new leads in the West End production of Cabaret, even though they are both originally American performers. They are Marisha Wallace, who has just taken on the role of Sally Bowles and Billy Porter. Billy, of course, best known for his work on stage and screen on Broadway as the original Lola in the musical adaptation of Kinky Boots in the award winning TV series Pose. Marisha, meanwhile, originally a New York based performer seen in the likes of the musical Something Rotten, has in the years been cementing herself as a bona fide household name here in the uk. She has appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, she has made countless TV appearances in fact, in addition to her very successful stage work in the recent award winning Bridge Theater revival of Guys and Dolls where she was Olivier Award nominated for her hilarious performance as Miss Adelaide in the British productions of Waitress the Musical and Dreamgirls, the show that first brought her to our shores, Marisha has become one of the London theatre industry's brightest stars. And stars are exactly what they are looking for in Cabaret. Since this production first opened with Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley a few years ago, they have been bringing in exciting combinations of starry performers to play the roles of the MC and Sally Bowles in this candor and ebb musical all about the years leading up to the Second World War. In Berlin, based on the play I Am a Camera, which itself is based on the novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood that is Cabaret. And while the London production has seen at this point various stars of stage and screen and the music industry take on these two powerful, demanding, challenging, iconic roles, this particular casting has also marked a very important turning point for them. Because it is, to my knowledge and to my recollection, the first time that either of these roles in this production, in this country, specifically in London, have been played by non white performers. We're going to talk about some of the qualities and nuances that that empowers them to bring to their characterizations of these two roles in today's review, as well as discussing every other aspect of each of their performances. We are talking vocals, we are talking accents because they're both American. And as always, I would love to know what you thought as well. If you have already seen Marisha Wallace and Billy Porter in the London production of Cabaret, let us all know what you thought of their performances in the comments section down below. And if you are watching this from New York, let me know if you would be interested in the possibility of Marisha and Billy transferring to go and play these roles in the current Broadway production. Not that I have any say obviously in whether or not that happens, but I have been hearing rumors that it's not necessarily beyond the realms of possibility. So let me know if that's something that you'd like to see. In the meantime, here is what I was thinking at the most recent gala performance of Cabaret. So let's talk about Marisha. First of all, because I have been a fan of hers on stage increasingly, I think with every performance. She is the only Effie I ever saw in Dreamgirls. When I saw it at the Savoy. I then enjoyed her very much in Waitress. I enjoyed her hugely in Guys and Dolls. I thought that was a real star turn. From all that being said, I could not envision, for a handful of reasons, how her Sally Bowles was going to work. And that's not because I didn't have faith in her as a performer. It's because it was so beyond any role she had ever played before on stage. Tonally, in terms of character, in terms of the quality of the music and the score, it felt very apart from just about everything else she'd ever done. And I'm a huge supporter, always, of casting against type. But I could not conceive, based on everything I'd seen her do before, of the route that she was going to take to land this character in this specific production, in this production originally directed by Rebecca Frecknell. But, gosh darn it, she found a way to get there. It is clear that she has worked extraordinarily hard on this role and she is delivering an acting performance, a nuanced performance beyond anything I've ever seen her do on stage before. She astonished me with this performance as Sally Bowles and I've seen, at this point, I think just over half a dozen actresses play this role in this production and they haven't all been successful. And alongside that, they've all started to fall into fairly similar patterns. And I found myself, especially in recent visits, growing a little more fatigued with the very shouty performance art esque, like young early career actress. Let me show you everything I learned at drama school approach to this character. I was never a fan of a Sally Bowles who came out of the gate screaming and was just like throwing it all out there immediately on stage. Marisha does not do that. Marisha feels quite distinct from most of the Sally Bowles characterizations I've seen in this production, and here's how a lot of it has to do with her relationship to her job as a singer in the Kit Kat Club. This is how we first meet Sally Bowles, if you don't know Cabaret. She is introduced by the MC and she rises up through the stage dressed as a baby smoking a cigarette and sings a song called Don't Tell Mama. It's very lewd, it's very suggestive. And we come to find out that she is a British girl living apart from her family in Berlin, Germany, in, like, the mid to late 1930s. She's more than a little reckless and carefree, and she is all about enjoying life and celebrating and having a party. Darling, isn't everything fabulous? Even despite her occasionally precarious circumstances, the owner of the Club Max being the man she happens to be sleeping with this week. And for a lot of previous actresses, maybe even for Jessie Buckley, who originated the role in this production, performing at the club was something that she enjoyed and something that she'd fallen into, but not necessarily something that she had sought out. We find out in the script that she is also set to be appearing in a film. And while she clearly has aspirations, she lacks a little bit of drive and conviction. She's very much just going with the film flow of life. Marisha, meanwhile, feels like a Sally more committed to the illusion that she is and can become a star in those scenes when she is talking about the club, particularly after she gets fired in the first act and is trying to plead with Cliff that it's a good idea for her to accept the offer to go back and work there in the second act after he has become a little bit more aware of the increasingly tense and troubling political situation around them. The way that she speaks about going back to be at the club and the way it lights this fire inside of her, she feels like a Sally whose relationship to that is quite different. It stands to reason then, that her vocal performance is also a little different. We've seen multiple sallies in this production and beyond, going back through history, who are not the strongest singers. It's not really a necessity of this character and of this score. Dame Judi Dench, a long time ago in London, not so much Liza Minnelli in the film in her Academy Award winning portrayal, of course. Very much so. Interestingly, we've actually seen a bunch of great actresses who happen to also be great singers take on the role in London and kind of diminish their own vocal performance. That is not something that Marisha does here. Marisha is still delivering you that characteristically raw and scrappy and edgy vocal. It doesn't sound polished. It doesn't sound like we're hearing her at the Royal Albert Hall. But there is that familiar force behind it that you will have heard if you've heard her knocking songs out of the park, like, and I am telling you from Dreamgirls, for example, in particular, it's her. Maybe this time. This is really a moment. And this, I think, is the part of the show where Sally also has the most license to really sing the thing, because it's not a diegetic performance. It's not her in the club performing for seedy locals to the best of her own ability. This is her in a split second, when Cliff has presented her with the Possibility with the option that they might settle down and raise a family together. Her considering that she might actually let herself be vulnerable, let herself fall in love and dare to dream that she could be worthy of and find true, like domestic happiness. In that moment, he freezes and she sings. Maybe this time it's contemplative. And Marisha pours all of this passionate wanting into it. It's beautiful. It works for me. It works within the context of this production. I think it's great. She sounds phenomenal. And again, she feels like a Sally who really cares. A lot of Sally's, even some of my favorites I'm thinking about Cara Delevingne. Have been wildly blase about the whole thing. Everything's bound to blow over. Why should I care about Polit? Oh, so what if I have an abortion? Like, very much those kind of vibes. And Marisha, again, a little different. She cares deeply and passionately, and she believes in the plans that they made and she believes in this relationship. And you can feel that she cares quite deeply for Cliff, as she says she does at the end of the show. That doesn't always land. I think it landed here perhaps the most I have ever believed it from her perspective. But alongside that, for Sally to make sense, what she brings is this extraordinary ignorance and this naivety. There's something sweet about it. It's clear that she has no idea what a precarious position the country is soon to find itself in. It's clear that she is not doing this out of spitefulness. There is a slight selfishness to it. But more so than anything else, you believe that she just doesn't know what's going on. She is just a disillusioned young woman, which is something I find hugely interesting in this production of the show, which more and more I have come to think of as a revival of cabaret for the 2000s. That speaks to the 2000s and speaks to this dreadful, looming return of fascism across various parts of the globe that I think we increasingly have to talk about when we talk about this production. I mean, it's playing on Broadway right now. And it has become impossible to ignore the fact that while this is playing out on stage and while Rebecca Frecknell has conceived a production which in its final moments speaks to simplicity of the nation and the momentum of this political change and how easily people were able to assimilate into it and just allow it to happen, you have everything that's playing out on the US political stage, which is why having American performers play Sally and the MC takes on profound new resonance. There was a moment of recognition when Sally says to Cliff, who suggests that they go and live with his family in Pennsylvania, that running away to America isn't going to solve all of their problems. That actually got a laugh. I don't know if that's because there was a little moment of recognition of Marisha being an actress originally from the US putting on an English accent to suggest that America doesn't hold all the answers or whether it's because of the current political situation. I can't tell you how many Americans have told me they're thinking about moving to the uk. You feel that quite palpably in Billy Porter's portrayal as well. But before I move on, I do want to talk about Marisha's accent, because this, again, not something I was expecting to be as good as it was. It doesn't feel wholly authentic, it feels manufactured, but it remains consistent. There are a couple of vowel moments that still elude her. It's almost always not like that kind of an oh sound. There are so many American takes on British accents where that is just the one thing that seems to escape for whatever reason. But the way I was able to kind of willfully interpret this for myself was that it felt as though this was another manufactured quality of Sally, that a lot of what she was presenting of herself to the world wasn't really authentic and that she probably didn't come from the kind of an affluent upper middle class background that that traditional Sally Bowles voice would suggest, that she was putting that on in order to elevate herself in society. Again, this is Sally Bowles who wants to be a star and is doing what she thinks she needs to in order to make that happen. I also, and this is just coming back to me, really admired the vulnerability and the fragility that she brought to it. We've seen some very strong Sally's in this role and particularly in the final moments after a really barnstorming rendition of the song Cabaret, which she really threw everything into and gave us all of that physicality that is demanded of her in this production when she has this scene with Cliff and she returns just utterly broken in the moment that he goes to strike her, when it finally dawns on him that she is no longer pregnant, that she has had an abortion. The way that she cowers entirely in the face of this intended strike is so painful, is so heart wrenchingly well acted. In short, the vocals, as you may be expecting, are formidable, but the acting, performance, the nuance of it and her interpretation of this character really amazed me. I thought she did a fantastic job. Now, let's talk about Billy Porter as the mc. But before we do, there's a little bit of crossover here. And I want to talk about how race intersects with this version of Cabaret. Because like I said, this is the first time in the West End production which opened first that either of these roles have been played by principal non white performers. To my recollection, Although Cliff as a character has consistently been played by black actors, a detail which has never spoken to anything specific within the script, but seems to have been, on either side of the Atlantic, a consistent casting choice for whatever reason. And I wonder if it's because there is this intention from director Rebecca Frecknell that this should speak to the modern political world and that we should see the uncomfortable parallels and whether the idea is that Cliff, as a racial minority, is empowered to. To be able to see the coming political change, be able to see the problems emerging, be able to see that division more acutely than those others around him. And if Sally is white, then that speaks to him having this strong reaction while she still thinks that everything's okay. It's different, obviously, when Sally is not white, but then we are living in very profound political times. And I think there's something really interesting about investigating the phenomenon whereby certain minority groups seem to statistically vote against their own self interest. This could get very political very quickly. And I am principally here still to talk about theatre. But I do want to talk about the optics of having the MC played by a black actor in this production. Because aesthetically, there's something that happens with this character where he begins as this very Germanic, marionette esque character. He becomes increasingly warped, increasingly malicious looking. He turns into a sort of a sinister clown. It gets a little bit skeletal. He wears these gorgeous, gorgeous costumes and then finally emerges historically as the Aryan ideal, as this white man in a very conservative suit with a very neat, conservative blonde haircut, a change in his hair color from the beginning of the production. Now, they don't do that for Billy Porter. He does a couple of things differently, actually, in terms of the costuming. He doesn't do a full face of white clown makeup as you might be expecting, for reasons I'm assuming are obvious to us all. He also doesn't wear a blonde wig when he comes out wearing the suit. He has his own natural hair, which I don't think any MC has ever done before. And this really. This is the moment where he sings the song I don't Care Much. This puts him in completely a different place for this number, because before it gave the suggestion that the MC was the first indication of this shifting tide, if you like, the MC was the harbinger of 1940s fascist German doom. And I've always thought of the character in this version of the show as a representation of Germany. He is not really here as an individual. He is a metaphorical indication of the mood of the country and how it is shifting. He represents the soul of the nation. He has a line, he says to Cliff towards the end, where he becomes the train conductor, greeting him as he is on the train leaving Berlin, heading to Paris, saying, you did not find our country beautiful. And he seems to speak to the entire presence of, if not Berlin, then Germany. So there's always been something hugely insidious about this performance of I Don't Care Much. But when Billy does it, there is such a pain, there is such a heartbreak, and it's as though he has assimilated into what is coming. He is the first to wear this suit that slowly, more and more members of the company, including Sally herself, will put on with some struggle, juxtaposed by Cliff's coat being removed by the ensemble, who enter wearing those same suits representing him, you know, not going along with everything that's happening, him standing apart from it all in principle. And it feels as though Billy is doing so as the MC against his will. And there is such a despair in this performance of I Don't Care Much. It is truly the high point of the show for his mc. And while we're talking about height, we also have to talk about the keys in which he sings this song, because for the first time, to my knowledge, in this production, on either side of the Atlantic, the keys have been adjusted. He sings it maybe like four semitones higher than the original keys that Eddie Redmayne opened with that everyone has been singing since. Adam Lambert over on Broadway has been opting up in this song, but I believe he has been opting up from the original key. I may be mistaken. Billy Porter still does the Adam Lambert opt up, but does so from a higher place. And Billy has always had a voice that has sat slightly higher. If you haven't heard it before, go back and check out his recording of Beauty School dropout from the 90s Broadway revival of Grease. It's going to change your entire life. And he sounds great, but he does also sound like Billy Porter. This is a little bit of an issue that I have here is he is acting and he is singing, and he is committing to the characterization to the best of his ability, it seems, but he doesn't seem to be able to tonally transpose his interpretation of it. He feels at all times like he is Billy Porter playing this role. He doesn't disappear into this character as we have seen Eddie Redmayne do, as we have seen Adam Lambert do, as we have seen countless other actors do in this production. At no point does he not feel like himself. That is a factor in the accent. We never quite master a German accent here. It at all times feels like an American accent. A couple of asides are fully delivered in an American accent. And in his own particular style, which feels more like a nod to himself as a personality rather than trying to find comedy through the character. It starts to feel a little pantomime in that way. He also, a little inexplicably, to me, has a couple of changed lines of dialogue during Vilkoman, when he is more directly in conversation with the audience. You know, he's greeting us into the club. He is the first person we see on stage once the show begins properly. And I don't know whether he's just come to London for this show and, like Sarah Jessica Parker before him, has become hugely enamored with public transport. But he makes two separate references to the London Underground or to London Trains, because he says both. Mind the Gap, which is something that you hear on the Underground constantly, and also see it say it sorted, which is the motto of the British Transport Police that you also hear in those Tannoy announcements. Kind of baffling to me. It gets a laugh of recognition from the audience. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever in either the place or the time that this is all occurring. But it is, even if anachronistic, a little charming, ultimately. I just kept thinking he could be a great MC in a production that was shifted, in a production that was recontextualized to be in a different time, in a different place, in a production that was recontextualized to a ballroom setting. That's. At that moment I realized that we're just not really transposing tonally, that it feels similar to his pose character and that he'd be great in that Angelicle Ball Cats revival, the ballroom set, one that may or may not be going to Broadway. And if they need to recast that, or if they do want to bring that here, as Andrew Lloyd Webber has suggested, he wants to. Billy Porter would kill in that show. I also think he'd be a great Hermes in Hadestown. A show in which performers are able to bring a little more of themselves and their own accents and their own characterizations to the material. Cabaret is a little trickier, especially for the mc, because he does feel ultimately like this sadistic marionette and like this creepy fascist clown. And I think for a performer to show a little too much agency and a little too much individuality, even if we do see that flame start to flicker out a little more in the second act, heartbreakingly, it's a little jarring, it's a little incongruous with the true ideals of the character as conceived in this production. In short, I think Billy has a great MC in him, but not this one. One of my favorite moments of his was his delivery of the line right towards the end of the song, if they could see her, or if you could see her through my eyes. The duet that he is singing with a gorilla that we find out at the very end, is an eerie metaphor for someone being in a relationship with a Jewish woman in the years leading up to the Second World War. This is a moment which on Broadway, it's been much discussed that Adam Lambert has had to admonish audience members who have laughed in a reaction to this punchline and has said to them, this isn't a joke. Pay attention, Adam Lambert, who is, of course, a Jewish performer. The way that Billy delivers this line, I contend, makes it impossible to laugh. I have no idea how anyone could laugh at the hushed, biting intensity with which he says the final line. She wouldn't look Jewish at all. It's impossible to feel anything other than. Than tension and terror in that moment because he delivers it so well. What I wish was a little stronger, as strong as his performance of I Don't Care Much is some of the faster songs and the songs like Two Ladies and Money, it doesn't feel like he's entirely in control of those. Even in Vilkomen, when, you know, he's more animated and more mobile and, like, crawling between the legs of all these other Kit Kat Club dancers on stage, he feels a little fatigued by it all. And his particular vocal quality seems to lack a little bit of the requisite fluidity to get through a patter song like Money, which for a long time now has not been my favourite part of this production. Anyway, I think it's one of the aspects of the material that's a little more discarded in this version of the show. Now, as always in these, I do like to talk about the rest of the company as well. Daniel Bowerbank is currently playing the role of Cliff Clifford Bradshaw. And it's so interesting because I keep going back and forth on whether Cliff feels like a character who is in fact bisexual and like the true nature of his relationship with Sally and how he is enamored with her or entirely in love with her in this one. It feels so one sided. It feels like he admires her and he loves the idea of her, but it's not a romantic love from his perspective. He just gets caught up in the thrill and the excitement of it all. And, you know, he doesn't feel nearly as strongly about her on an emotional level as she does about him. And she understands that. And that's really interesting in conjunction with the fact that Fred Haig's Ernst Ludwig feels like the most overtly gay Ernst Ludwig I've ever seen. There has always been a brief moment in this production when he is trying to get Cliff to go out on the town with him and he says we can commune with each other or something like that. And Fred takes a full step towards him in an unmistakable move. It is, to my mind, clearly to be read as an understood homosexual signal between the two of them, making Fred's Ernst Ludwig feel by the second act like a gay fascist who was participatory, perhaps against his own self interest and perhaps against his own better judgment or understanding. Another thing that I think it's important to talk about is in the 2000 and 20s, because bafflingly, it's not just straight people supporting these terrible political agendas. Fenton Grey, as charming and emotive a Hersch Schultz as I have ever seen, particularly in the second act, particularly in the face of that Kristallnacht invoking moment when the MC shatters a glass by stepping on it. And Herr Schultz suddenly glimpses the mc, who hasn't been visible to him or Fraulein Schneider before in that scene. And he suddenly sees the face of the country, essentially, and he suddenly realizes what he is amidst. Vivienne Parry has returned to the production as Fraulein Schneider, although I did not see her at this performance because the role was being played by Jessica Curtin, who usually plays the role of Fraulein Cost. That's how the understudy system works in the West End at least. And Jessica, I thought, was wonderful. It's nice to occasionally hear a really robust Fraulein Schneider vocal. That usually comes with a performer who's technically a little too young to be in the role, but again, brought a tremendous amount of passion to it, which is what that character needs. It remains one of the best shows in the West End. I can still recommend it wholeheartedly. With these two in the lead roles, it has shifted back. It's interesting how this kind of changes with each cast to feeling like a show very much about Sally and where she is the star. Even the way that this is framed as it was originally conceived to be this vehicle for Eddie Redmayne as the mc. It's Marisha's show, it's Marisha's world and the rest of us are all just living in it. I am so intrigued to hear what everyone else thought, but those have been my thoughts about Cabaret. Let me know in the comments section down below if you have seen these two already. Or like I said, if you're in New York, let me know if you would like them to be in the Broadway production. Maybe the powers that be are listening or they're watching with their cabaret eyes. And if you have enjoyed listening or watching, make sure you are subscribed right here on YouTube or following me on podcast platforms so you don't miss any of my upcoming theater reviews and stagey content. I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh my God. Hey, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.