LETTER FROM LONDON: 2/6/25

TRYING TO BE YOUR OWN OLD CHUM

The above photo was taken on Tuesday night in Billy Porter’s dressing room after the performance of Cabaret in which he and Marisha Wallace are now starring as the Emcee and Sally Bowles on the West End having begun their run together only last week. I went backstage afterwards to tip my hat to them as they were donning theirs to scurry out of the theatre to head to their homes or maybe a quick round of drinks with some friends before settling into bed and the latest eight-shows a week rhythm that all theatre artists must find that has less to do with a step-ball-chain or changing a register and more to do with the silence of sleep and making room for some other dreams since this one about becoming a musical theatre star has come true and they’re once again living the day-to-day disciplined reality of it. Director Rebecca Frecknall has color blind cast this production of Cabaret as she did her production of A Streetcar Named Desire which is opening for a three-week run again on the West End this month before heading to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. Since its opening almost four years ago, Frecknall has made a point of doing so mostly though hiring a Black actor to play Cliff, the Christopher Isherwood stand-in, in all the casts that continue to be the tuned-up engine that has kept this West End hit revival running so smoothly.

I first saw it in a preview with Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley in these roles when this revival opened in 2021. I told a friend during that interval back then that it had never occurred to me that Cliff could, of course, be Black but I had always wanted to see a Black Sally and a Black Emcee. And now that I have, I can’t think of more perfect casting than these two. Billy has, however, become such a cultural presence within his acting career as “Billy Porter,” the musical performer and political activist, that I had a hard time at first adjusting to his being the Emcee. There is no attempt at a German accent and he knowingly slips in anachronistic asides not in the script as he alludes to the present political climate in America, the construct all Americans are finding ourselves living within no matter where we are settling in out here in the world. He’s just sort of riffing and rolling out the numbers until Kristallnacht arrives for Fraulein Schneider and Herr Schultz and you can see how seriously he suddenly takes it all, how scared he is, how sad, how angry, and how now he must find a way through it yet again and survive.

Cabaret is an interesting musical because its two iconic characters, the Emcee and Sally, never interact. Until now. There is a remarkable moment that is new to this latest iteration of the show that Billy and Marisha told me they found in their rehearsals and Frecknall okayed. For this production, Frecknall has also taken the song “I Don't Care Much,” the lament that was written to be sung by a sex worker, and given it to the Emcee forlornly strolling the production as much as he is supposed to be out strolling Berlin. Tom Scutt has designed some outlandish costumes for the Emcee’s production numbers that appear to be a bit too extravagant for the KitKat Club’s budget. But the clothes that offer an actual shock are the ones the Emcee wears to sing this song, his afterwork attire when he is costumed in normality. Seeing him dressed this way serves as a kind of precursor that Frecknall and Scutt are layering into the production for the uniformly not-caring-much, ill-fitting brown suits everybody is wearing at the end as if they have emerged from a George Grosz painting after he spent a day thinking about the work of Otto Dix, his contemporary and a fellow anti-fascist. Redmayne and all the rest of the Emcees just kept on strolling after another work night had wrapped up at the KitKat Club where they had given the audience what it wanted no matter who was in it because they were too tired to be disgusted anymore. Disgust had let go of their proffered arm at that point and they no longer escorted it home. Instead they now walked into the pre-dawn hours in Berlin and the city’s approaching dark night of the soul. It is that fatigue - the stroll before the lockstep - that fascsim always finds as its entry point after having created it. There is a thread of that in America at the moment as Trump and Musk and their henchmen bask not only in their purposeful destruction and chaos but also in the I-don’t-care-much exhaustion of the opposition. I have seen Frecknall’s production six or seven times with different Sallys and Emcees but it hits differently now after Tump’s first few weeks and America continues its stroll.

Billy chooses another way to do this number. He doesn’t stroll on through as the song fades - or once did - but circles back to come face-to-face with Sally who has come unobtrusively onto the stage herself but still remains quite separate from him. She is strolling through her sadness and desperation; the streets are just the place where she does it. As Billy searingly builds the song by riding its subtext, Sally seems so alone there beside him where she has found a home in the existential dread of Berlin. He senses her panic. She senses his. He grabs her by her shoulders and sings the last lines of the song right at her as if telling her that they had to be obtrusive, no more lonely strolls. Billy builds the song to a stunning climax unlike the other times when it just sort of trails off into the darkness of Berlin. He is now the howl that Sally wants to make but has lost her way toward it. It’s a stunning moment that sets up what comes next, the show’s title song.

Frecknall has directed Sally’s big “Cabaret” number away from its being celebratory, an anthem. It is instead now a one-act set to music. It is filled with angst and anger. It is defiant. It is close to being deranged in how it troublingly tracks how sometimes the only way you can cease to feel endangered is to be perceived as rather dangerous yourself. All of Frecknall’s Sallys have had to find their way toward that without getting lost. Wallace as Sally is a wonder. I told her backstage afterward that it was the most brilliant interpretation of that title song I had heard since I saw Natasha Richardson do it for the Roundabout Theatre’s New York production at Henry Miller’s Theatre in 1998. Wallace is certainly the best singer I’ve ever heard in the role. Hell, she’s the best singer working in the London theatre. But to play Sally convincingly you have to navigate your own talent that got you such a role because Sally Bowles would have never been cast as Sally Bowles. Her neediness ain’t for nothing. It’s a balancing act and many performers stumble a bit as they try to steady themselves. Not Wallace. Sally is barefooted for much of this production and Wallace keeps those feet firmly on the stage, which is her ground and her grounding, while there above them she is baring Sally’s soul, her resolve, in a dizzying revolve of musical numbers and bohemian domesticity and entrenched Nazism. Just as Sally left England to find success and herself in the cabarets of Berlin, Marisha left America to find both in the theatres of London. When I went to see her backstage, freshly freed of her makeup, her stunning beauty was revealed along with her graciousness. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen your freckles,” I told her. ‘I love them.” She brings some of that freckled face girl to Sally, too, this Black Becky Thatcher in a land of White Margarets. That takes stamina as does playing the role of Sally Bowles. If you are in London in the coming months, don’t miss her in the role.

As I strolled the London streets after seeing Cabaret, I thought about Frecknall’s production of Streetcar which stars Paul Mescal as Stanley and Patsy Ferran as Blanche. I saw it four times when it was at the Almeida. I’m seeing it again at its matinee on the 13th. But like Sally and the Emcee, I was feeling alone in the existential dread that can feel so much like home to me and has since I was a boy back in Mississippi when I was neither Tom nor Huck but Becky wasn't a good fit either. I just knew I was a character in my own narrative. It has always been the way I have survived it all from the consecutive deaths of my parents when I was seven and eight and the subsequent childhood sissy years in Mississippi when I learned about the importance of akimbo and finding kindred spirts to my arrival in New York when I was 19 to attend Juilliard’s Drama Division to learn how to become other characters when the ones I was playing as myself proved to be too hard too often to get right. I was a drug addict and lost everything. I went into recovery and got it all back. I became a pilgrim and gave it all away. I think Cabaret hitting differently made me feel slightly out-of-sorts and sad about America which is not only experiencing a fascist coup but it is more personally to me becoming a version of 1960s Mississippi and all that brings with it. I feel like that scared forlorn little sissy longing to find himself and his place in the world. I first saw Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret in Mississippi at the Capri cinema up the hill a bit from Millsaps College which I had begun attending at 17. I went back to see it three of four times in the span of two weeks It was everything I wanted my life to be about -bohemian, writing, little dabs of decadence thrown in here and there, finding a way to live cheaply but grandly, fighting political evil, and a lot of fucking. If you had told that teenage boy there in the dark at the Capri that one of the characters that he’d become would be the Editor-at-Large at the Curran Theater in San Francisco where he’d live for five years and interview Joel Grey onstage as part of the Groundbreakers series he hosted, he would have feigned disbelief but he’d be riding the subtext of belief. That has always been my subtext: believe. No matter what, do that first. Layer it in as the precursor to everything else. Be your own old chum.

“Something about her has always for some reason reminded me of Sally Bowles,” Henry Geldzahler once said to me when we left a cocktail party at Pamela Tiffin’s place in the West 60s. This was probably around 1979 and Henry was in the second year of serving as Mayor Koch’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs after having left this job as the first Curator of Twentieth Century Art at the Met. Tiffin had once been an actress who married and divorced legendary magazine editor Clay Felker. She then married Edmondo Danon, a philosopher and the son of Italian film producer, Marcello Danon. Henry was great at playing the character of Henry in his life. Indeed, he was one of the great New York characters and he spotted me early on as having the potential to be one myself and cut me out of the herd and added me to his fold. He was my first mentor in New York and, unlike disgust, I took his proffered arm as he escorted me into rooms and inner sanctums. Tiffin’s little function to fund something was one of them.

“The woman who cornered me on the couch - she was a hoot - told me that Pamela had been in the film Summer and Smoke when I told her I was from Mississippi,” I told Henry.

Henry laughed and when he laughed he suddenly was more redolent of cigars and Grether’s Pastilles. I started to tell him what the film Cabaret had meant to me when I saw it those several times at the Capri, but he stopped me. “Do you know who that woman is who cornered you?” he asked.

“Irene,” I said. “She said her name was Irene. She loved talking about Mississippi. When I tell people I’m from there, it either stops or starts conversations.”

“Here name is Irene Selznick,” said Henry “She produced A Streetcar Named Desire. She is the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and was the wife of David O. Selznick.” I wasn’t quite sure who they were so feigned nonchalance as my stand-in for lack of knowledge. “You actually don’t care,” said Henry. “Learn to care.”

I’m still learning.

Onward.