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Mickey-Jo saw Matt Willis and Katie Hall in CABARET | thoughts on the musical revival's new West End cast
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Mickey Jo
I actually feel very vindicated because when this was initially announced I had my suspicions that this was going to be a really great casting moment for the show and now I'm going to tell you why it is. But but first an introduction to me. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel or hello to those of you listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a content creator and critic here on social media and earlier this month I was very lucky to attend the gala performance of the new cast of cabaret at the KitKat Club in the West End welcoming new leading performers Matt Willis as the MC and Katie hall as Sally Bowles, two of the most sought after leading roles in musical theatre which have over the almost five year history of this West End production of show being played by a whole host of varied performers. Originated of course by Eddie Redmayne and Jesse Buckley. They have since been portrayed by the likes of Mason Alexander park and Rob Madge and Cara Delevingne and Jake Shears and self esteem Billy Porter, Marisha Wallace, most recently Reeve Carney and Eva Oblizada. Now Matt and Katie are the newest leads of the show and on my, I don't know, 14th, 15th visit to the production I was very excited to see what they would bring to these characters. I was also a little bit nervous, not about either of their performances, but simply because seen a different production of Cabaret only a few weeks before in Madrid. You can find my review of that also wherever you are seeing or hearing this. And because I see this particular production directed by Rebecca Frecknell so frequently, I do worry about it losing a little bit of its impact. It's not the easiest show to go and revisit. And Cabaret is at its most effective and successful when it can really land and deliver impact and shock. And since for a little while now, I've been seeing every new leading pair in the West End, you can go and check out my many other videos talking about the rest of them. For the last couple of years, I've been trying to avoid seeing the show in between those visits, but I was so fascinated by this very different Spanish production, I had to go and check it out. It was a relief then to find out when I did revisit the West End production, that it remained as effective as ever. And because I think the creative vision for this production, not only Rebecca Frecknell's direction, but also Tom Scutt's design, as well as all of the other creative contributions, is so rich and so nuanced and so layered and so thought thoughtful. There is almost always something new for me to interpret or discover or realize or take away from each repeat visit to the show, even after seeing it more than a dozen times. And this time there was something that struck me about Julia Cheng's choreography. And I had noticed it when I was first seeing the show years ago, but the meaning and impact of it kind of hit me in a different way this time. And I was sitting only for the second time in my life in the new stall seating on the other side of the stage, beyond where the proscenium used to be, now that it has been reconfigured, as in the round, to become the KitKat club itself. And during the opening moments of the second act over the Entr' act, right after Davina McCall and Steven from the Traitors were pulled on stage to do a little bit of audience participation dancing, I was noticing the choreography that the KitKat Club performers were doing and how inspired it is by Vogue and all of the thwacking that was going on, and also presumably how inherently deliberately anachronistic that is for a 1930s Germany set story. At which point the identity of this choreography, as well as several of the details of about the production and the way in which it has been cast and the way in which it has been costumed kind of crystallized for me, because I think in many ways this has always been a version of Cabaret, which can look both like a time capsule of the era which it is portraying and a mirror held up to the uncomfortable realities of society, one which is in many different parts of the world currently shifting steadily and dangerously back towards fascism. Speaking of which, if you haven't heard about it yet, go and see here. There are blueberries at Theatre Royal Stratford east if you really want to experience the discomfort of that mirror. And I've spoken before about the ending of Frecknell's version, how it doesn't directly invoke the atrocities of the Holocaust, but instead delivers to my mind a message about becoming complicit and participatory in a worsening society. And I think so much of cabaret in the 2000s is about reminding us that this is a world that we are perhaps veering towards, a world that could soon be all too familiar. And I think that idea is well reinforced by this almost uncanny combination of the classic and the oddly contemporary. That's what I took from it this time around anyway. But beyond my thoughts about the show, for the umpteenth time, I am here today to let you know about the new principal performances and before I read about it in the comments, if anyone does happen to be fatigued by me talking about Cabaret yet again, then I urge you to subscribe right here on YouTube and turn on notifications so that you are the first to know tomorrow when I talk about something else. In the meantime, for those of you who are curious, and if you have seen them for yourself, I would love for you to comment down below with your thoughts. Here is what I thought of Matt Willis and Katie hall in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club. So we're going to begin with Matt Willis because Katie is the more established musical theatre performer. Matt Willis has done theatre before and in fact has a background in theatrical training when he was younger pre boy band success. If you don't know, Matt was one of the members of Busted for the Americans who may be listening to this. Busted were the group who originated a song that was later covered by the Jonas 3000. They've also in more recent years formed a combination supergroup with another 2000s era boy band McFly, to become, you guessed it, McBusted, which I've always thought does sound a little like the legal consequence for the Hamburglar. And Matt is not the only member of that combination supergroup to have some sort of a musical theatre connection because Tom Fletcher, the brother of musical theatre actress Carrie Hope Fletcher, recently scored Paddington the Musical at the Savoy. And for a lot of performers of that era, and since then, and also before, it isn't uncommon that they would have some sort of musical the training in their background. Victoria Beckham auditioned for the Spice Girls, the much Talked about Victoria Beckham with mein hair from Cabaret. Fun fact. But in any case, Matt does have a background in musical theatre and has an awareness of, and clearly an enormous fondness for the material of Cabaret. A lot of performers play the MC because it's a very coveted role and they know it and love it already. And one of the best tools against what we've come to call bad stunt casting is an understanding of the material that you are portraying. It's not enough just to be tal. Performers who really get the tone of the thing and the mechanism of a complicated piece of theatre like Cabaret are inevitably going to deliver much more thoughtful and sophisticated performances. And that is what Matt is doing in this show. Matt Willis is brilliant as the mc, a real top tier mc, the likes of which we've seen a handful of times in this London production. I would say Matt is very much up there with the likes of Rob Madge and Mason Alexander park and Eddie Redmayne. And I think it's not necessarily a reinvention on the character, an infusion of exciting and dangerous new qualities. It reminded me perhaps most closely of the version of the character created by Orville Peck on Broadway, another music industry performer returning to theatre. And the thing that will strike you about Matt Semc is the sheer theatricality of it. At no instant does this feel like a pop performer coming back to the stage. And it's not his first foray into musical theatre beyond busted. He was also the dentist in Little Shop of Horrors at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which was brilliant. He was stellar in that role. Subsequently, he played Dr. Pomatter in the UK tour of Waitress, which I didn't think was as great a fit for him because he's not an obvious generic romantic leading man type. He's much more interesting than that. I actually think he has the acting chops to have sunk his teeth into a role like Earl in Waitress. And you can see in his mc he is an actor, the way he moves, he has an immense dance skill that he is bringing to this role, but it's the physicality of every single moment. One of favorite seconds in this production is the one in which Eddie Redmayne used to transform back into the MC after playing a train conductor towards the end of the show. And give us this glimpse of the very affected physicality that he was doing before that no one has really quite gone as far in doing since. The whole like haunted marionette thing that he did on the Tony Awards and everyone freaked out about it. And I don't Think I've delighted in that moment quite as much until Matt played it. That shift back into it and it's because has an MC that can feel dangerous and subversive and he isn't an entirely friendly presence. There's some sense of menace about him beneath the joker esque smile of it all. But also he's not just playing sinister on the nose, which I think is a mistake. And people try and interpret these very black and white definitions of what they want the MC to be. And I think like every other aspect of this production of the show, it is nuanced and layered here and complicated with an awful lot of room for interpretation. They have cast so many different performers to play this role and the show can be affected substantially based on how they do it. And Matt opens it with an enormity of charm and charisma, but also something almost self sacrificing in his characterization. You get the sense that he really wants to disappear into a version of this character. It isn't with perfect posture and gleaming visage that he looks out to the audience. It is like others before him, hunched and eerie and characterful. We got the sense at Regent's park that he was this really great character actor. And he is funny, but also quirky and a little odd and deliberately subversive. He does the sort of lingering mania, just behind the eyes thing very, very well. And of course, with the MC, we have to have a conversation about the vocal performances. I've mentioned the dance already and it's one of the first times in a while that I've really noticed an MC who can really dance. Not to say that the others recently haven't been able to, but I just haven't thought about it. I've not been struck by, oh, wow, this is an MC who can dance. And the vocal performance to go with that is brilliant. And there are very few bel canto for the MC in the score where they're just sounding sort of lovely and sustained and powerful. I don't Care Much is probably the closest to that. Or the first version of Tomorrow Belongs to Me, which are both haunting and very well sung. But what I love is the edge and the little bit of rasp that Matt introduces to a vocal. This slightly rocky quality to it. It conveys a sense of the showmanship that the likes of like Robbie Williams or Freddie Mercury probably would have brought to this role. Can you im of those as an mc? Incidentally, I think what Matt is doing is the closest we may get to getting to see what that would have looked like. My overall point from all of which is Matt Willis is one of the best MCs that London has seen in the last half a decade. And don't knock alleged stunt casting until you have tried.
- [11:42]
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- [12:44]
Mickey Jo
Friday. Now let's talk about the rest of the company, including leading lady Katie Hall. Now, Katie has a prestige musical theater background. She has, until very recently, recently been playing Fantine in Les Miserables in the West End. But her journey with that show began as cosette on the 25th anniversary international tour. And speaking of the Jonas Brothers, even if you haven't seen Les Mis or any other productions in the uk, you may know Katie hall from playing the role of cassette in the 25th anniversary concert that was also filmed opposite Nick Jonas and alongside the likes of Alfie Bow and Norm Lewis and Ramin Karimloo and Samantha Barks. And you know, there's something about her Sir Cameron McIntosh and birthday parties because she was also Christine daae on the 25th 5th anniversary tour of Phantom of the Opera, making some of my favorite vocal choices that have ever been made in that role because she has this glorious glistening soprano. But also Fantine, she has a powerful belt as well, which she would deploy during the final layer moments. If you haven't heard that, go and check out the questionably illegitimate audio that's on YouTube. Anyway, Katy is a musical theatre performer who I have been excited about for a Very long time. And when she was announced for this, I thought, oh, that makes perfect sense. And also how exciting it's going to be to see her do something that is more raw and vulnerable, but also contains a lot more just, honest to God, acting. Because she has made a name for herself doing these epic musicals, but these sung through musicals. And it's one thing to then do a book musical where you have an awful lot of dialogue, it's quite another to do Cabaret. Because those book scenes in Cabaret, not only are they complicated and confrontational, they're also very, very long. It basically is going to feel like you're doing a play, especially if you're Sally Boltz, the MC is there to deliver these pastiche musical numbers. After a little bit of audience banter, Sally has so much dialogue, so much character work, and so you'd have to imagine coming from shows like Les Mis and Phantom, this almost would feel, I guess, like starting again in the industry and doing something very, very new. And she's doing, I think, a terrific job in the role. Her singing, as you would expect it to be, is absolutely pristine. There are two schools of thought with Sally Bowles. One is that she doesn't necessarily have to be a great singer, that she has got to where she is in the world, which is an admittedly seedy nightclub in Weimar, Berlin, on the basis of her guile and her charm. The other is that you can sing the role and especially the more introspective, non diegetic musical moments like maybe this Time as well as you want to. And Marisha Wallace has sung the role brilliantly and so has even Oblazada. There have also been actresses who are not necessarily singers first, who have also given some of the most memorable performances. Sally Bowles that I've seen. Katie, as you would expect, goes the route of Gloria singing. But in her nightclub scenes earlier on, performing the likes of Don't Tell Mama and Mine Hair, she definitely adds in more of a layer of grit and gives us a slightly more raw vocal. But it's her characterization of Sally that I'm a little more interested in. And not to forever be comparing performers in this production, but we have seen versions who have portrayed Sally as a little more duplicitous. There is a line that she has early on when Cliff innocently asks her what part of England she comes from, before volunteering a couple of examples that evidence him to be an American who knows very little about the uk. At which point Sally, a little puzzlingly, is evasive and tells him that he must never ask her any personal questions. And as a performer, you can take a moment like this and run with it and allow your entire portrayal to be shaped by the notion that this is a woman who is in this part of the world by herself at an auspicious moment in history and is not telling the truth about her circumstances or where she came from. From Katie, Sally doesn't really go there. She is, I think, the more traditional route into the character where the naivety with which she is characterized in the material comes from a perceived background of wealth. In other words, this feels like a rich, white, blonde Sally Bowles, who was living a fairly upper middle class existence in the United Kingdom and then fled out of boredom or out of juvenile rebellion, and truly does not have a sense the danger that she is now surrounded by. And I think as much as anything else, it's the very crisp received pronunciation delivery that gets us to that version of the character. And it's a choice that really makes sense for the character, especially when we are first acquainted with her at the club and then subsequently when she is trying to talk her way into Cliff's lodgings as the thing goes on. Then there's a difficult balance to portray because she remains throughout the show naive to the present dangers, but also, though in some ways waking to them as well. She is as horrified as anyone else by the way that the first act ends by what the engagement party between Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz devolves into. Where it gets a little more challenging, is how you reckon that kind of a privileged interpretation of the character with maybe this time, but more so with the performance of Cabaret at the very end and the meaning behind Sally's attire in this number and her physicality in this number and how distraught she appears to be as she performs it, which Katie gives herself over to beautifully and brilliantly. The meaning behind all of that is not entirely transparent. And so the best performances have to build steadily towards it. And I think over time and over the weeks of her run, she'll be able to bring in more layers of complexity in order to walk her Sally Bowles more towards that conclusion. I felt like that final moment of her character arc arrived a little abruptly. And the danger, I suppose, is that when you have a Sally Bowles who feels as though she comes from wealth, and when she has that line to Cliff about like, we never have dinner and champagne at the Adlon anymore, it feels as though she actually once did, then a song like Cabaret can come off a little bit more like a strop and I think we have to be able to believe some more of the genuine darkness that she is grappling with. And even as she says, like politics, it's not about us and it'll all work itself out. I think there are more dimensions that she deserves to have, which I have no doubt that Katie will discover over time. A reminder, I saw both of them very early on in their run.
- [19:09]
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- [19:47]
Mickey Jo
The supporting cast, however, do not change as frequently and so these performers have been in their roles for considerably longer, including Baker macassar, who is playing the role of Cliff. He is very animated in this role, very lively. Occasionally I wonder if the speed of the line delivery is a little bit too fast, but he plays a fascinating Cliff who you could definitely interpret as simply being gay all the while, but being in his own way quite fascinated by Sally Bowles. Neither the material nor the production takes a particularly hard stance on Cliff's sexuality. I also had a slightly hard time reconciling Baker and Katie as a genuine couple in a way that these two can sometimes feel like sometimes it's just as effective when they feel utterly disjointed. Ruthie Henshaw, meanwhile, a legendary performer of the West End and Broadway, is continuing in the role of Frulein Schneider. It's fantastic to see her once more on a West End stage and she's still doing really great work, bringing leading lady diva presents to all of these fantastic scenes and the two monologue songs that she gets to perform. And any day that you get to experience Ruthie Henschel singing Kander and Ebb is a great day in your life. But she, like Baker and I think this happens over a long run, has found even more animation and color and vibrancy in her character. And that could be a tricky thing to do with Freud Line Schneider, who feels often dejected and tired and a little miserable, but hers is one who, even before the ignition of this later in life love affair with Herr Schultz, has this passion and vitality to her, in spite of the way that she describes herself. It Feels more sort of deliberately self deprecating. And the most triumphant moment of her arc when she rises up on the stage and sings out who isn't at war with anyone? During her second act number, what would you do? Is somewhere between a blood curdling scream and a defiant growl. It's a fantastic moment from her as an actress opposite Robert Hands as Hair Schultz, who has a great way of making me hear this material again, which I've heard on many occasions now as if for the first time. I also love the way he plays. Another very thoughtful moment of the show after the MC stamps on a napkin covered piece of glassware in order to represent the throwing of a brick through his window. Also invoking Jewish wedding traditions. The two characters look at one another in a moment of prolonged silence, which I've always thought of as Schultz in the wake of this anti Semitic violence, noticing for the first time the increasingly ugly face of the country, as it were. And he does this brilliant triple take thing where he doesn't want to see it. He's frightened by it. He deliberately looks away and then sort of reluctantly looks back, but continues to turn his head. And even at the end of the show, despite Cliff's urges that he move to America, that he leave because of the way that everything looks, he still insists that he understands and knows the German people people and that this will all blow over and he will be fine. Speaking of that moment, what follows immediately afterwards is if they could see her. The performance with the gorilla. The current occupant of the gorilla suit, which is meant to be some kind of a mystery. So I won't tell you is doing better gorilla work than I have ever seen anyone else do before. I said that last time around. Still sensational. But there is a real danger in getting so many laughs from that song because it's never been this funny. And the fear is that you could get a laugh after the punchline, which has been a. Well, docum problem happening on Broadway and a little in the West End. And the punchline, and I won't go into all of it now, it's been talked about often enough, is meant to be a very hard hitting and sort of devastating one. And Matt Willis walks this tightrope so well and I think delivers that final line in a way that makes it impossible to get a laugh because of where he creates a gap. Because it's not. She wouldn't look duplicated Jewish at all. Allowing for an uncomfortable laugh after Jewish where nobody ought to be laughing if they are paying attention instead at least at this performance, he did this thing where he paused before Jewish and we had to anticipate it and he said, she wouldn't look, and then waited and then really spat it out. Like I could see the saliva over the gorilla face. And at that point, it's so brutal and cruel and. And horrid that you can't laugh. Surely you can't laugh at that. Finally, let me tell you about Lucas Koch, who is playing the role of Ernst Ludwig and bringing new colours to it I have never seen from any other performer before. Because he's so boyish in the role and youthful, he feels very much like a foolish young man who has been deceived into believing that the Nazi party are truly going to be the builders of the new Germany. And you know before, when we have that moment of revelation when he takes off his coat and you see a swastika armband and then it turns around because it's in the round. You've got to show both sides of the audience and always at least one person gasps. His attitude thereafter sometimes feels more indicative of a man who really understands what he's standing in solidarity with, but his feels, in his own way, quite naive, like he's the other side of the coin to Sally. He's the foolish young man of the country who has been duped into participating in this regime. And not only does his playfulness up to that point kind of sell us on that story, it also makes it even harder for us to swallow it, because he is goofy and funny and charismatic. And so for the audience members who don't know where his particular arc is going, then you really understand where the gasps come from. There's been a conversation throughout the history of this production about whether or not Ernst is a queer character and whether there's some sense of a flirtation between him and Cliff. I don't particularly take that idea from this current pairing. I think what reads is slightly flirtation from him is the same energy that I used to find confusing from boys at secondary school. Are they closeted or are they just posh and confident? These are the questions we're always asking. But it's probably the first time I've ever walked out of a production of Cabaret and, among other things, said to myself, wow, that was an exceptional Ernst Ludwig. He's doing great work. So those have been my thoughts about my most recent visit to the show. It remains just as great a time as ever to go and see it in the West End. They continue to go from strength to strength with their cast. I'm hearing exciting rumours about the direction that they may want to head in next and if you have any ideas in the comments section down below, feel free to share them. Who do you think should be next to play the MC and Sally Bowles in cabaret at the KitKat Club for the next few months? Those roles will be played by Matt Willis and Katie Hall. Go and check them out in the show if you haven't already, and if you have, let me know what you thought of them in the comments section. In the meantime, thank you so much for listening to yet more things that I seem to have to say about Cast Cabaret. I am genuinely excited to once more go back to this production. It's always a fantastic evening at the theatre and as always 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
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