Willkommen! Anna Wintour and Zoë Kravitz Host a Starry Preview Performance of Cabaret
Early on Tuesday evening, the most extraordinary assortment of actors, writers, designers, producers, and good, old-fashioned theater-lovers left all their troubles outside, and plunged headlong into the Kit Kat Club—er, that is, New York’s August Wilson Theatre, where an utterly transporting new revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Cabaret, directed by Rebecca Frecknall and starring Eddie Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Ato Blankson-Wood, and Bebe Neuwirth, is now playing.
Ahead of the show’s opening night this Sunday, two longtime friends of Redmayne’s, Anna Wintour and Zoë Kravitz, joined up to co-host a special preview performance, inviting 100 of their nearest and dearest to see—or, more accurately, experience—one of the most buzzed-about productions of the 2023-2024 Broadway season. (And, let us tell you, the season is packed.) The cherry on top? A portion of the proceeds from Tuesday night’s ticket sales benefited the Center for Youth Mental Health, a New York-based organization devoted to treating depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues in young people.
Preceding Cabaret’s “curtain,” so to speak (because it’s performed in the round, this revival doesn’t actually have a curtain; actors either sidle to the stage through the aisles, or rise up from below through a trap door), was a 6:00 p.m. cocktail reception in the Green Bar—one of three (!) new bars installed at the August Wilson for this production—on the mezzanine level. (Elsewhere in the theater at this time, a dedicated faction of the Cabaret cast proceeded with its nightly 75-minute “prologue,” during which a roving band of dancers and musicians performs for and fraternizes with the gathering audience.)
There, Wintour and Kravitz’s guests enjoyed shots of Schnapps, passed hors-d’oeuvres, and other refreshments as they mixed and mingled. A quick scan of the crowd revealed all kinds of interesting encounters: While, in one corner, Justin Theroux jovially greeted former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, elsewhere Brandon Uranowitz giggled with Jordan E. Cooper; Will Welch huddled with Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian; Sam Smith strode in and surveilled the scene, closely followed by Jordan Roth; and LaQuan Smith caught up with Prabal Gurung and Sarita Choudhury. Enjoying a night off from Sweeney Todd, a heavily bearded Aaron Tveit—one of Redmayne’s costars in 2012’s Les Misérables (along with Hugh Jackman, who was also in attendance)—could be heard discussing the two prior iterations of Cabaret that he’d seen on stage (both directed by Sam Mendes, but mounted nearly 20 years apart), while Kravitz told Frecknall and choreographer Julia Cheng that in about two weeks’ time, she’d be seeing her “friend Cara”—as in…Delevingne—in the West End version of this same show. (Originally starring Redmayne and Jessie Buckley, it’s been a hit since it opened back in 2022, collecting seven Olivier Awards along the way.)
For Tom Scutt, Cabaret’s brilliant costume and set designer, the project of reconfiguring a 100-year-old Broadway theater to evoke a seedy nightclub in Jazz Age Berlin was as appealingly complex as the text of the show itself. “We have this piece that comes from the ’60s and talks about artists and marginalized people in the ’20s,” he notes. (The first New York production, based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, opened in the fall of 1966.) “You feel like you’re having a conversation with history in some way. And so the building and the design of the building reflect that: It has modernity, but it also has nostalgia. And I think it’s about how we can continue carrying the torch of these themes and these stories.”
Not long after Ben Platt and his fiancé, Noah Galvin, sliced through the crowd to find their seats in the theater proper, the rest of the group followed, filing down the stairs to the orchestra level. Then came the show itself: two hours and 45 minutes of late Weimar-era debauchery, punctuated by some of the most iconic songs in all of musical theater (among them “Willkommen,” “Mein Herr,” “Maybe This Time,” and “Cabaret”). Also, some truly seamless stagecraft: When, shortly after “Don’t Tell Mama,” a member of the ensemble had to duck out of the show, Cabaret’s crack hair and makeup team had a swing, Hannah Florence, ready to go at a moment’s notice—sending her out right on time for the next number. (If not for the announcement during intermission of a change in the evening’s casting, the rest of us would have been none the wiser.)
Indeed, proceedings were so rousing that when, shortly before the start of Act II, members of the audience were invited to do a little jig on stage, Kravitz couldn’t resist getting up and joining in.
Needless to say, the audience was on its feet by the final scene—and when a small group convened in the Red Bar, at the rear of the orchestra, for a meet and greet with the stars, the excitement was palpable—even eliciting a few shrieks of delight when Redmayne and Rankin came out. So, how is the show feeling to them now, in the final countdown to opening night? “I think we’re—shockingly—feeling really ready,” Rankin says, the platinum bob that she sports as Sally Bowles tucked neatly behind her ears. “It’s an emotional show, but I feel like everyone has each other’s back, which is really rare and nice.” The audience is another asset, per Redmayne, who has traded the Emcee’s madcap wardrobe—a dingy tank top and leather shorts; a crazy clown costume; a terrifyingly severe three-piece suit—for an off-the-shoulder top and black trousers. In that role, he explains, “the other character in the scenes with you is the audience. And every night, we are getting the most thrilling, different, but engaged audiences, and it’s fueling me in the most exciting way. And I feel that because the idea with the production is that once you pass the threshold, you get discombobulated and taken down into these cavernous bars, hopefully you really do leave all your troubles outside on 52nd Street, and by the time you arrive in here, you can get seduced by the world of it.”