It all started in a Luton youth club. “They had a party night on Thursdays,” Julia Cheng tells me. “People in a circle dancing to Puff Daddy. It was probably on until 8pm but that feels really late when you’re 12. That’s when I was like: I really love dancing!” For Cheng, it was the start of a career that sees her nominated for an Olivier award in April, for her choreography for the musical Cabaret.
Cheng is rehearsing a new cast – Fra Fee and Amy Lennox, taking over from Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley – when we meet backstage at London’s Playhouse theatre, transformed into the louche, debauched Kit Kat Club. She was a surprise choice for the Cabaret job: not a big name, no track record in musicals, her dance styles of hip-hop and waacking a long way from Bob Fosse. But her movement is instrumental in creating the atmosphere of the show, its humour, beauty and ugliness, its blurred identities and physical and moral contortions, and all the colours of Kander and Ebb’s Weimar Berlin.
