Eddie Redmayne goes clubbing in a stylishly immersive ‘Cabaret’ (Broadway review)

Director Rebecca Fracknell and designer Tom Scutt have build an elaborate, immersive faux-club experience around this revival at the August Wilson Theatre — redubbed the Kit Kat Club, including on the title-free marquee — but it seems disconnected from John Kander and Frank Ebb’s beloved musical about a couple of expat creatives in pre-WWII Germany. Eddie Redmayne has a great voice and mesmerizing stage presence as the emcee, but his thick accent and stylized movements make his opening number less of a come-hither “Willkommen” than a greeting that immediately puts us on guard. In this stylish but oddly bloodless production, the emotional center shifts to Bebe Neuwirth and Steven Skybell as late-in-life lovers whose earnest ardor blinds them to the magnitude of the Third Reich’s threat.

You can read my full review in the June/July issue of Musicals magazine.