NEW YORK, NY.- Willkommen, bienvenue, Broadway!
Cabaret, the ever-popular (and portentous) musical set in a Berlin nightclub on the eve of the Nazis rise to power, will return to Broadway in the spring in a new production that has won raves in London.
The producing team on Tuesday morning announced a plan to transfer the show to Broadway, and said it would open at August Wilson Theater, where a revival of Funny Girl is scheduled to close Sept. 3.
Cabaret producers did not announce any other details, but it is widely expected that Eddie Redmayne, the film star who played the nightclubs Master of Ceremonies when this revival opened in London, will reprise the role on Broadway. The shows other big role, Sally Bowles, the nightclubs star singer, was initially played in London by Jessie Buckley; that role has not yet been cast in New York.
Cabaret, with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb and a book by Joe Masteroff, originally opened on Broadway in 1966, and that production, directed by Hal Prince and starring Joel Grey, won eight Tony Awards, including for best musical, and ran for three years. Grey went on to star in a 1972 film adaptation that won eight Academy Awards, including one for Grey and one for his co-star, Liza Minnelli.
The musical was revived on Broadway in 1987, again with Prince directing and Grey as the Emcee. Then in 1998, a new production directed by Sam Mendes and starring Alan Cumming and Natasha Richardson, came to Broadway via the Roundabout Theater Company; that production closed in 2004 and then returned in 2014 for another year, opening with Michelle Williams opposite Cumming.
This latest revival, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, opened in London in 2021, and won seven Olivier Awards, including one for best musical revival. Its run is continuing. Critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the production nerve-shredding, and said, Frecknall pulls us into a hedonistic milieu, only to send us out nearly three hours later reminded of lifes horrors.
The lead producers are Ambassador Theater Group, a British company that owns and operates theaters around Europe and the United States and has become increasingly active in producing on Broadway, and Underbelly, a British company closely associated with the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Cabaret will join multiple shows on Broadway this season that deal with antisemitism, among them Just for Us, a one-man show from comedian Alex Edelman, which is now running, as well as Harmony, a musical by Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman that opens in the fall, and Prayer for the French Republic, a play by Joshua Harmon, which is to open in the winter. Last seasons Tony-winning best play, Leopoldstadt, which closed this month, and the winner of the Tony for best musical revival, Parade, which runs until Aug. 6, are also about antisemitism.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.