Jessie Buckley as Sally Bowles in Cabaret
(Picture: Marc Brenner)Arriving at the Playhouse Theatre, transformed into the decadent Kit Kat Club for Rebecca Frecknall’s staggering revival of Cabaret, you’re spirited through a small door at the side of the imposing building, then invited to move through a series of concrete-walled corridors. The ambience is more warehouse party than West End musical, and soon you arrive at a bar, lit up in red neon, where musicians drape themselves over their instruments and performers lurk in corners. It’s disconcerting and intriguing in equal measure.
“It’s amazing how quickly people get lost and feel like they’re in a labyrinthine club, simply because you’re changing the traditional signposts of what it means to go to the theatre,” says the show’s designer Tom Scutt, who has masterminded the Playhouse’s metamorphosis from Victorian-era music hall to Weimar nightclub. “I love the opportunity to play with that and to introduce new ideas to theatre-going, that take from club culture or from gig culture, to sort of dissolve those boundaries.”
