#Oscar Rankin

[possibility221]

Angstober 24, Oct. 25 prompt: you're no better

Elementary episode: 3x16

[happygirl2oo2]

Elementary as textposts part 13/?

[cptrs]

[meyerlansky]

i have never wanted to lock doors and set an entire room on fire the way i did when people fucking laughed their way through If You Could See Her during Cabaret tonight

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

"Just wanted to share some stage door video (primarily Eddie) from last night. An exciting evening for sure!"

Thanks and credits to : Nic Trudell on fb

Video was taken on April 1st, 2024

[thishadoscarbuzz]

250 - Her Smell

We've come up on another anniversary episode of This Had Oscar Buzz, and we've got another favorite that long-time listeners have heard us praise before: 2019's Her Smell. Debuting on at TIFF 2018, the Alex Ross Perry film is a daring and ambitious take on the riot grrrls of the early 1990s. Starring Elisabeth Moss as Becky Something, an addict egomaniac who brings her own downfall, the film audaciously immerses us in Becky's destruction (and later climb out of it) in ways that are exhausting and rewarding. Earning stratospheric praise for Moss by even the film's most frustrated viewers, the film was cursed to a microrelease and stayed an Oscar outsider despite vocal critical support.

This episode, we talk about the audacity of both Perry's film and Moss' performance. We also get into the depressing state of independent distribution, Perry's open comments regarding its release and support for Moss' performance, and the Gotham Awards.

Topics also include the film's fake album covers, our appreciation for difficult characters, and our superlatives for the past year of the podcast.

But perhaps most exciting is two bits of news right at the top: our new theme music by Taylor Cole and our newly launched Patreon!! Please consider subscribing and joining us for This Had Oscar Buzz: Turbulent Brilliance over at patreon.com/thishadoscarbuzz!!

Links:

The 2019 Oscar nominations

Her Smell and the state of independent film

Alex Ross Perry campaigns for Elisabeth Moss

Her Smell's fake album covers

Subscribe:

Patreon

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Apple Podcasts

Google Play

Stitcher

[shrimpheaven42]

Gonna blow so many bubbles in this thing.

[macrolit]

The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

NYT Article.

*************

Q: How many of the 100 have you read? Q: Which ones did you love/hate? Q: What's missing?

Here's the full list.

100. Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson 99. How to Be Both, Ali Smith 98. Bel Canto, Ann Patchett 97. Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward 96. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman 95. Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel 94. On Beauty, Zadie Smith 93. Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel 92. The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante 91. The Human Stain, Philip Roth 90. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen 89. The Return, Hisham Matar 88. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis 87. Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters 86. Frederick Douglass, David W. Blight 85. Pastoralia, George Saunders 84. The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee 83. When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamin Labutat 82. Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor 81. Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan 80. The Story of the Lost Child, Elena Ferrante 79. A Manual for Cleaning Women, Lucia Berlin 78. Septology, Jon Fosse 77. An American Marriage, Tayari Jones 76. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin 75. Exit West, Mohsin Hamid 74. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout 73. The Passage of Power, Robert Caro 72. Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich 71. The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen 70. All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward P. Jones 69. The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander 68. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez 67. Far From the Tree, Andrew Solomon 66. We the Animals, Justin Torres 65. The Plot Against America, Philip Roth 64. The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai 63. Veronica, Mary Gaitskill 62. 10:04, Ben Lerner 61. Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver 60. Heavy, Kiese Laymon 59. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides 58. Stay True, Hua Hsu 57. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich 56. The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner 55. The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright 54. Tenth of December, George Saunders 53. Runaway, Alice Munro 52. Train Dreams, Denis Johnson 51. Life After Life, Kate Atkinson 50. Trust, Hernan Diaz 49. The Vegetarian, Han Kang 48. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi 47. A Mercy, Toni Morrison 46. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt 45. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson 44. The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin 43. Postwar, Tony Judt 42. A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James 41. Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan 40. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald 39. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan 38. The Savage Detectives, Roberto Balano 37. The Years, Annie Ernaux 36. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 35. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel 34. Citizen, Claudia Rankine 33. Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward 32. The Lines of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst 31. White Teeth, Zadie Smith 30. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward 29. The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt 28. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 27. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 26. Atonement, Ian McEwan 25. Random Family, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 24. The Overstory, Richard Powers 23. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Alice Munro 22. Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo 21. Evicted, Matthew Desmond 20. Erasure, Percival Everett 19. Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe 18. Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders 17. The Sellout, Paul Beatty 16. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon 15. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee 14. Outline, Rachel Cusk 13. The Road, Cormac McCarthy 12. The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion 11. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz 10. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson 9. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro 8. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald 7. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead 6. 2666, Roberto Bolano 5. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen 4. The Known World, Edward P. Jones 3. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel 2. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson 1. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante

[andreadesantis3806]

HOTD s2 scenes and concepts that ACTUALLY were top tier

(Got really tired of nit picking the obvious faults, i needa see the good sides too ya know T_T)

Rhaenyra's search for Luke's remains, her grief and Syrax mirroring her anguish.

''I want Aemond Targaryen'' Cuz thats the Nyra we shouldve seen THROUGHOUT the season. To CONTINUE. To NOT get FORGOTTEN.

Daemon Rhaenyra argument

Baela saying she hates her father sometimes, but ends up being the better parts of Daemon anyway.

Jace hugging Nyra and them crying together.

Jace remembering Laenor and Harwin, and missing Luke.

Every scene where there is Simon Strong.

Daemon hallucinating young Nyra and viserys.

Aegons grief over Jaehaerys

Aemond's brothel scenes, both of them. They radiated this raw wounded vulnerability as well as a different sort of power that comes with baring yourself fully at the face of adversity.

Every scene with Gwayne.

Baela and Moondancer chasing Cole.

Rooks Rest

Sunfyre.

Alicent and Aegons tragic miscommunications

Seasmoke claiming Addam

Rhaenyra calming Vermithor, and her face when she watches the seeds burn to death in regret and acceptance.

Hugh claiming Vermithor

Rhaenyra and Addam showdown

Silverwing flying over KL with Ulf

Aemond fleeing after seeing Rhaenyra with Vermithor, Silverwing and Syrax behind her.

Nyra and Mysaria's relationship. The understanding they have. Its like Nyra having that frank and genuine advice and understanding after Rhaenys is gone. The understanding she cannot find within her council, not even her son. Despite their kiss, with or without it, it is actually soothing for Nyra to have someone she can rely on completely.

Alyn confronting Corlys (That shit was painful)

OSCAR TULLY. THATS IT. THATS THE STORY.

Daemon and Alys' friendship and understanding

Alys Rivers in general. Like she is so cool to me yall. And the casting is perfection. You know how canonically she looks much younger than she actually is? Like that timeless vibe? The fact that she could be in her youth as well as over 300+ yr old. Like legit Gayle Rankin nailed that aspect. In certain lights, she looked a little closer to Daemon's age, a bit younger perhaps. Sometimes she looked older than even him for few seconds. But then sometimes, she looked like a youthful lady in her prime, smiling. Chefs kiss truly.

Daemon's vision.

Daemon kneeling to Rhaenyra

''Leave me again, at your own peril.''

''I could not, I have tried.''

Aemond and Helaena's scene in the balcony.

Syrax being protective of Nyra whenever they are together.

THE THEME BG TRACKS?! RAMIN DJAWDI IS FUCKIN D I V I N E

[ducktoonsfanart]

The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings - The Lord of the Ducks?! -Duckverse in June - Mystical Creatures - Cosplay and literature - Duck comics, Ducktales, Quack Pack, Darkwing Duck and Mighty Ducks - Duckverse - My version - Fantasy

Well, more specials related to Donald Duck's 90th birthday that I drew and related to one of my favorite topics, certainly related to fantasy, literary works and movies, and one of the best works in the world that is definitely worth reading, and it is Tolkien's works, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist (study of the origin of language) and one of the greatest fantasy writers of all time who will certainly influence other authors and future generations. Born in 1892, died in 1973. He translated Beowulf, one of the oldest surviving Anglo-Saxon epics, and also wrote The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and other works. However, he was best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He inserted a lot into his works from Norse, Celtic, Slavic, ancient Greek and ancient Roman mythology, as well as elements from antiquity and the Middle Ages that happened in Europe, as well as religious elements, and of course he invented the Elvish language in his own way, and it is considered that that and high fantasy. The Hobbit was published in 1937, while The Lord of the Rings was written between 1937 and 1954, and published in 1954 and 1955 in three volumes, which are called "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King". Of course, it received a lot of film and animated adaptations, the most famous and popular of which are Ralph Bakshi from 1978, the version by Rankin-Bass from 1977 and 1980 The Hobbit and The Return of the King, and certainly the most famous that received the most Oscars are Peter Jackson's films with the same titles awarded with many Oscars and shown from 2001 to 2003. And three parts of The Hobbit from 2012 to 2014. So I drew combining from literary works and certainly from the film version of Peter Jackson, since that is my favorite.

Not to go further, since I would like to talk about the plot of the story for a long time, it is certainly about Middle Earth and the conflict over the power over the whole earth and about the conflict of one ring. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, the famous hobbit joined the wizard Gandalf and the thirteen dwarves of Thorin's Company in a quest to reclaim their home and take their treasure back from the dragon Smaug. The Lord of the Rings deals with the fact that Sauron, the dark lord, made the rings and gave them to dwarves, lords and humans in order to rule the world. But he is defeated by Isildur and King Elrond, but his spirit remains and can only be destroyed if the ring is destroyed. So the main task was given to four hobbits led by Frodo Baggins. And there is the elf Legolas, the dwarf Gimli, the human and prince Aragorn and the wizard Gandalf.

So I drew and combined two brilliant fantasy novels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings into one where I gave my favorite characters specific roles that would suit them in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in my own way. Yes, I combined almost everything from Donald Duck media, comics, cartoons, video games, but mostly from Donald Duck comics, including Paperinik New Adventures, as well as from Ducktales, Darkwing Duck, Quack Pack and Mighty Ducks. Yes, not all the characters stopped, because this is only the first part of my version of The Lord of the Ducks. Donald Duck would certainly be Bilbo Baggins, the hero from The Hobbit, and his nephews Huey, Dewey, Louie and Phooey Duck would be hobbits like Frodo Baggins, Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck, Samwise Gamgee and Pereg "Took", and added Newton Gearloose (Gyro's nephew) as an additional hobbit. Yes, the Quack Pack version would be more appropriate, since older boys and teenagers are into this kind of fantasy. Scrooge McDuck is certainly Gandalf the Great (doesn't matter if gray or white), Drake Mallard is the prince and future king of Aragon, ruler of Arnor and Gondor, Moby Duck (Donald's older cousin who is a seafarer) as the dwarf Gimli, Abner Whitewater Duck as Thorin Oakenshield (the leader of a group of 12 dwarves), Gyro Gearloose as the elf Legolas, Wildwing Flashblade and Nosedive Flashblade (brothers from Mighty Ducks) as Boromir and Faramir, Odin Eidolon as King Elrond, El Capitan as Gollum (since he is very fascinated by gold, and surely with a ring, otherwise he appeared in the first episodes of Ducktales 1987), Flintheart Glomgold as the wizard Saruman the Great, John D. Rockerduck as Gríma Wormtongue and finally Negaduck himself as Sauron, since he loves chaos and that he rules the whole world and loves jewels. There is no replacement Smaug dragon so I drew him as his interpretation.

Briefly Duckverse in Middle Earth and our heroes who need to save the world from evil and Sauron and Smaug. How about this? I hope you like this idea and these characters and love fantasy as much as I do. :D I know Tolkien didn't like Disney because of certain views, and I apologize for that, but since many authors like Tolkien's works, including Don Rosa, why shouldn't I? And sorry for these long sentences and finally the music for this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SBQvd6vY9s

Feel free to like and reblog this if you like it, just don't use these same ideas of mine without mentioning me, thanks! Also this is intended as a dedication to the Duckverse in June, the fourth week under the theme "Mystical Creatures", however elves, dwarves, wizards and dragons can be counted under that, so I am dedicating to @duckversejune2024, @secret-tester, @tokuvivor, @queer-in-a-cornfield. And I dedicate it to my friend @cityoftheangelllls who likes ducks and fantasy like me. I hope you like this. Once again, happy belated birthday Donald Duck and his 90th birthday!

[possibility221]

Inktober 2024, Oct. 16 prompt: grungy

Elementary episode: 3x24

[eddieredmayneargentinablog]

"Looking back at rehearsals with Oscar, Tony, and Olivier winner Eddie Redmayne and Tony award nominee Gayle Rankin. See them as Emcee and Sally through Sept 14th only. #KitKatClub"

📸: Jenny Anderson. Source: Cabaret at the kit kat Club NYC on Facebook

[sir-sanguinus]

I'm on the penultimate episode of Elementary, and this show is so... Beautiful. It's inter-personal relationships are gorgeous.

Watson and Holmes admitting that they are more than partners, but people who love each other (and it's even more important that it's platonic)

Sherlock and Mycroft's goodbye several seasons ago, before Sherlock knew how to talk to his family.

And now, Holmes and his father, having made so much progress. Sherlock being in shell-shock, being genuinely hurt by his father's death. A man for whom he had nothing but hatred for the first 2 seasons.

I think this Sherlock Holmes is beautiful because he makes connections with people. His friendship with Captain Gregson, Detective Bell, and ME Hawes, his partnership with Joan, Alfredo and Cassie becoming friends, his brother and father and their development, his attempts to atone for past mistakes, with Lestrade, Oscar Rankin, and his attempts to help those who needed it, like Kitty Winter and Shinwell Johnson. I also want to mention Sherlock's relationships with Jamie, Fiona Helbron and Athena.

His relationships are so diverse and whilst Sherlock remains bizarre, and at times stubborn, he is genuinely a good person. He struggles, he learns, he relies on others for help and advice. He feels so human, which means an audience associates with him more.

I just wanted to acknowledge how much Sherlock has grown, emotionally. Seeing him express sadness at his father's death just shows that.

Anyway, go and watch Elementary. It's got to be one of the best Sherlock Holmes adaptations on TV.

[eddie-redmayne-italian-blog]

Life Is a Cabaret! The Shimmering Kander and Ebb Classic Heads Back to Broadway Starring Eddie Redmayne

BY ADRIENNE MILLER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JULIEN MARTINEZ LECLERC

STYLED BY HARRY LAMBERT

March 5, 2024

When I was 15 years old, I saw Cabaret for the first time, at a community theater in northeast Ohio. Though I considered myself sophisticated in important ways (I recall that I was wearing a wide-leg Donna Karan bodysuit that evening), my experience as a theatergoer was then limited to The Sound of Music and Ice Capades: Let’s Celebrate. I wonder if my parents, who had season tickets to the theater, knew that the show wasn’t exactly “family” entertainment. Set in 1931 Berlin as it careens toward the abyss, Cabaret depicts alternating stories. There’s the doomed romance between a fledgling novelist named Clifford Bradshaw and a young singer of supreme charisma (and mediocre talent) named Sally Bowles. And then there’s the seedy nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, which is populated with a highly sexualized cast of misfits and overseen by a ghoulish Master of Ceremonies. The show’s ethos—the glamour and terror, the irreverence, the campiness, the unreality—shaped my taste forever, and I knew that I had just experienced one of the greatest works of art ever created. I would never look at theater, or life, in the same way again.

Over three decades later, I’ve seen more stage productions of Cabaret than any other show, including a revival starring the original Emcee, Joel Grey; I’ve seen the Bob Fosse film version over 50 times. I’ve pretty much always got one of Fred Ebb’s sardonic lyrics jangling around in my head. Today, it’s “You’ll never turn the vinegar to jam, mein Herr,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Youthful exposure to Cabaret also turned out to be a life-changing event for the star of the new production opening this month on Broadway, Eddie Redmayne. “Weirdly, when I was 15, it was the first thing that made me believe in this whole process,” he says. Redmayne was a student at Eton when he first played the Emcee; he had never seen Cabaret when he was cast. On this late-autumn evening, Redmayne is speaking to me from Budapest, where he is shooting a TV series. “It reaffirmed my love for the theater,” he says of his first experience. “It made me believe that this profession, were I ever to have the opportunity to pursue it, was something that I wanted to do.”

Now, as he prepares for the transfer of the smash-hit 2021 London production of Cabaret (in which he also starred), Redmayne is reflecting on the power and durability of the John Kander and Fred Ebb masterpiece. “The show was just so intriguing and intoxicating,” he says, adding that the character of the Emcee posed many questions when he portrayed him for the first time, but provided scant answers. A few years later, when he was an art-history student at Cambridge, he again tackled the part of the Emcee at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. At a dingy performance space called the Underbelly, he did two shows a night, the audiences getting rowdier and more intoxicated throughout the evening. He’d get up the following afternoon and stand along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile handing out flyers for the show, dressed in latex. “There was just a sort of general debauchery that lived in the experience,” he says. When his parents came one night, they were alarmed to find that their son had turned into a “pale, lacking-in-vitamin-D skeleton.”

Flash forward 15 years. The Underbelly cofounders and directors, Charlie Wood and Ed Bartlam, would approach Redmayne—now with an Academy Award for The Theory of Everything and a Tony for Red under his belt—with the idea of again playing the Emcee. Redmayne was eager to return to the role, but many questions remained—principally, who might direct it. In 2019 he happened to have been seated in front of the visionary young director Rebecca Frecknall at the last performance of her West End production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke. It was an emotional evening for Frecknall, who’d been working on the project on and off for a decade. She and Redmayne were introduced, but “I had mascara down my face and probably didn’t make a very coherent first impression,” she tells me from London, where her new show, The House of Bernarda Alba, has just opened at the National Theatre.

Redmayne was astonished by the depth and delicacy of understanding that Frecknall brought to Summer and Smoke, a romance with the classic Williams themes of loneliness, self-delusion, and unrequited love. A few months later, Redmayne asked Frecknall if she’d consider directing a revival of Cabaret. “I said, ‘Of course I’ll do it, but you’ll never get the rights,’ ” she recalls. Those rights were held up with another production but were shortly thereafter released, and Frecknall went to work assembling her creative team—among them musical supervisor Jennifer Whyte, choreographer Julia Cheng, and set and costume designer Tom Scutt. Frecknall’s transcendent production of Cabaret opened on the West End at the tail end of the pandemic and succeeded in reinventing the show anew, winning seven Olivier Awards, including one for Redmayne and one for Frecknall as best director.

When Cabaret begins its run in April at the August Wilson Theatre, starring Redmayne, Gayle Rankin, Bebe Neuwirth, and Ato Blankson-​Wood, it will be just the second major production of the show directed by a woman. (Gillian Lynne directed the 1986 London revival.) In Frecknall’s version, Sally emerges as the beating heart of the show. “I find that most of my work has a female protagonist,” says Frecknall, who has also directed radical new interpretations of A Street­car Named Desire, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Romeo and Juliet. “And I have a different connection to Sally,” she says. “I was really drawn to how young she was…and how she uses that sexuality and how other people prey on that as well.” The role of Sally Bowles, originated in this production by Jessie Buckley, who also won an Olivier for her performance, will be played this spring by the brilliant Scottish actor Gayle Rankin.

“When I first met with Gayle, I was blown away by her passion and fearlessness,” says Frecknall. “She’s a real stage animal and brings a rawness and wit to her work, which will shine through. She’s going to be a bold, brutal, and brilliant Bowles.” Redmayne also praises Rankin for the depth of emotion she brings to the part, and for the vulnerable and volcanic quality of her interpretation.

Rankin arrives at a candlelit West Village restaurant on a chilly winter evening in a sumptuous furry white coat that would put Sally Bowles to shame. Her platinum hair is pulled back from her face and her dark blue eyes project a wry intelligence. Rankin lives near the restaurant and mentions that she has recently joined a nearby gym—not that she’s going to have much time for workouts in the coming months. Over small seafood plates (of her shrimp cocktail, she shrugs and concedes, “It’s a weird order, but okay”), she shares her own rich history with Cabaret.

She grew up in a small Scottish village, watching Old Hollywood movies with her mother and grandmother. At 15, she left home to attend a musical theater school in Glasgow; on her 16th birthday, she visited New York for the first time with her family. “It sounds like a cheesy, made-up story,” she says, but when she and her parents took a tour of the city on a double-decker bus, they passed by the Juilliard School. “I thought,” she says, “ ‘I am going to go there.’ ” The following year, she and her father flew from Glasgow to New York for her audition. She would become the first Scottish drama student to attend the institution.

At Juilliard, there’s an annual cabaret night, in which all third-year drama students perform songs. Rankin sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl, but she recalls her acute sense that she could have chosen a number from Cabaret. “I think I secretly always wanted to be that girl,” she says of the classmate who did perform those songs.

A couple of years after she graduated Juilliard in 2011, Rankin’s agents approached her with an opportunity to audition for Sam Mendes’s 2014 revival of his celebrated 1998 Broadway version (first staged in London in 1993), with Alan Cumming reprising his Emcee role. She was cast as Fräulein Kost—an accordionist sex worker who is revealed as a Nazi—playing opposite a revolving cast of Sallys, including Michelle Williams and Emma Stone.

Rankin has recently emerged as a fierce presence in films and in television (The Greatest Showman and two HBO series—Perry Mason and the upcoming season of House of the Dragon), but then “it kind of came across my desk this summer to throw my hat in the ring for Sally.” How does Rankin make sense of this fascinating, mystifying character? “Everything is so sort of up for grabs…. People feel as if they have a claim over her or know who she is. And the real truth is, only Sally gets to know who Sally is.” She has been rereading Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin—the inspiration for the show—in which the English writer sets the dying days of the Weimar Republic against his relationship with the young singer Sally Bowles. (In 1951, the playwright and director John Van Druten adapted the book for the stage with I Am a Camera; in 1963, Broadway director-producer extraordinaire Harold Prince saw that the play could be musicalized and hired Joe Masteroff for the libretto and the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.) Isherwood based Sally—somewhat—on Jean Ross, a British flapper and chanteuse who later became a well-regarded film critic, war correspondent, political thinker, and Communist. (He gave the character the last name of writer and composer Paul Bowles.) For the rest of her life, Ross maintained (correctly) that Isherwood’s portrayal of her diminished her reputation as an activist and as an intellectual.

“Ross wanted so badly to write to Isherwood,” says Rankin, “and to condemn him: ‘You slandered my name. You said all these things about me that weren’t true.’ And as far as she got in the letter was ‘Dear Christopher.’ ” As Rankin builds the character, it’s this notion of the real Sally—not the fictive version constructed by Isherwood—that she finds so captivating, and heartbreaking.

The upending of Sally as an “object” is another core conceit behind the production. “I felt that other productions I’d seen had this slightly stereotypical male-gaze idea,” Frecknall says. She views Sally’s musical numbers as describing different facets of female identity. “Don’t Tell Mama” deals with the fetishization of youth and virginity, and in Frecknall’s production, Sally, disturbingly, appears in a sexy Little Bo Peep costume; “Mein Herr,” a song about manipulation, control, and female sexual desire, is in conversation with the cliché of the strong, “dominant” woman. “I think Sally’s very clever at being able to play an identity, and also play it against you,” she adds. The character “has secrets to tell us,” Rankin says. “Important things to share with us. And I think that’s the umbilical cord between her and the Emcee.”

Although Sally and the Emcee share the stage for less than five minutes, the Emcee’s musical numbers can be seen as a kind of meta-commentary about Sally’s actions. “What interested me was the idea that the Emcee was a character created by Hal Prince and Joel Grey,” says Redmayne, referring to the actor who portrayed the Emcee in the original 1966 production. “He doesn’t exist in the book Goodbye to Berlin and was their conceit to connect the story of Sally Bowles.” Rankin believes that there is a kind of mystical bond between the two characters. “As to whether or not he’s a higher power, or higher being, he does have an access to a higher knowledge,” Rankin suggests. “I think Sally feels that too.”

And who is the Emcee? A supernatural being? Puppeteer or puppet? There are no clues in the text. Prince conceived of the character as a metaphor representing Berlin itself. “The idea of him as an abstraction,” Redmayne says, “and so purposely intangible, meant that I actually found a new way of working.” Redmayne built the character from the ground up, starting with big, broad gestures that would be gradually refined. The “very fierce, ferocious intensity” of Herbert von Karajan, the famously dictatorial Austrian conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic and a Nazi party member, served as a particularly fertile inspiration.

Historically, the role of Emcee has been coded as gay, and embodied, in most prominent productions, by gay actors. Frecknall’s production had to address what it meant to cast Redmayne, a straight white male actor, in the role. “Tom [Scutt] and I felt very clearly that, well, it’s not going to be the Emcee’s tragedy,” Frecknall says. A person like Redmayne—given his class, ethnicity, and sexuality—would emerge from the catastrophe unscathed. Redmayne concurs: “As the walls of fascism begin to close in, he has the privilege to be able to shape-shift his way out of it.” The character’s journey is from Shakespearean fool to Shakespearean king.

In Hal Prince’s 1966 production, Grey’s delicate, meticulous performance as the cane-twirling Emcee is pure nihilism—as a representation of Germany’s conscience. In the later Mendes iteration, the Emcee emerges as the central victim: In that production’s chilling last scene, Alan Cumming’s louche Emcee removes a black trench coat to reveal a concentration camp uniform; a burst of bright white light follows, from, presumably, a firing squad. But in Frecknall’s version, the Emcee is exposed not as a victim of the system, but as the chief perpetrator. The show, she notes, “becomes the ensemble’s tragedy.”

“I was really intent that we cast it very queer and inclusive,” says Tom Scutt, Cabaret’s multitalented set and costume designer. We are sitting on a black banquette in the lobby of his hotel, across the street from Lincoln Center, where he’s working on Georges Bizet’s Carmen. To mount a revival of Cabaret in 2024, Scutt contends that “there’s no other way. That was really at the headline of our mission.”

There are two casts in the show: the main company and the prologue cast, which provides pre-curtain entertainment. In general, the members of the prologue cast don’t come from traditional musical-theater backgrounds, but from the worlds of street dance and hip-hop—“dancehall, voguing, and ballroom scene,” Scutt notes—and in the London production, some of the prologue performers have been promoted to the main cast. “There is something deeply, deeply moving about how we’ve managed to navigate the usual slipstream of employment.”

Part of Scutt’s intention with Cabaret has been to “smudge and diffuse’’ the audience’s preconceived notions. Inclusive casting is one mode for change; iconography is another. In this case, that has meant no bowler hats, no bentwood chairs, no fishnet stockings. The aesthetic is less Bob Fosse and more Stanley Kubrick. “We started off in a place of ritual,” he says. “I really wanted the place to feel as if you’ve come into some sort of Eyes Wide Shut temple.”

Scutt has reimagined the 1,250-seat August Wilson Theatre as an intimate club—warrens of labyrinthine new corridors and passageways, three new bars, and an auditorium reinvented as a theater-in-the-round. Boris Aronson, the set designer of the show’s iconic original 1966 production, suspended a mirror on the stage in which the audience members would see their own reflections—a metaphor that forced the audience to examine its own complicity; but in Scutt’s design, the audience members must look at one another. Access to the building is through a side entrance; as soon as you arrive, you’ve already lost your bearings.

In many ways, it’s remarkable that such a weird and complex work of art masquerading as a garishly entertaining variety show has had such longevity. Scutt has an explanation about why this piece—created by a group of brilliant Jewish men about the rise of antisemitism and hate, about the dangers of apathy—​continues to speak to us so profoundly almost 60 years after its Broadway debut.

“I can’t really think of anything else, truly, that has the same breadth of feeling in its bones,” Scutt suggests. “I honestly can’t think of another musical that does so much.” As grave, and as tragically relevant, as the messages of Cabaret are, he and the members of the company have found refuge in theater. Both Scutt and Frecknall grew up singing in their churches as children; theater is to them a secular church, a space where human beings can congregate and share healing. “It was made with such pain and such love,” Scutt says. “Which is absolutely the piece.” 

In this story: hair, Matt Mulhall; makeup, Niamh Quinn. Produced by Farago Projects. Set Design: Afra Zamara.

[dorothy16]

kitkatclubnyc Looking back at rehearsals with Oscar, Tony, and Olivier winner Eddie Redmayne and Tony nominee Gayle Rankin. See them as Emcee and Sally Bowles through Sept 14th only.

[louissatturi]

Im seeing some people being kinda mean about foolish rp and acting like he wont be able to do "good rp" because he is too "silly"

While i cant say much about his rp, i dont watch him, he can do more dramatic and intense rp just look at the tazercraft prank and forever hitting leo and while i did't watched DSMP from what i heard of his lore on that im sure he did Oscar worthy perfomaces

ORDEM PARANORMAL IS SILLY

Sure its on the horro-gore-mistery-thriller genre it is SILLY and GOOFY and the character are most of the time IDIOTS

Ordem paranormal has FELPS and BEAMON on its rooster of cast menbers for god's sake

The cast of o segredo na ilha prioor the start of the last episode they ware chanting TPK TPK (total party kill) and then the chanting chaged because of bea to PEPEKA PEPEKA (a slang term for PUSSY)

Now its now SPOILER territory from now own since i will speak in rp stuff

- Fist season Thiago Fritz has a expirence where he has to flirt with a married woman to get information

- The whole sematary episode from o segredo na floresta where we have joui jouki gave a sleeper hold in a poor old woman, liz doing a exorcism and César drinking gasoline

- Thiago Fritz gets "NAKED" in O segredo na floresta

- Desconjuração where the players spend 1/2 hours trying to resolve a library puzzle and when joui tried to kick the door to free them luba, his player said "eu continuo chupando" insted of chutando (sucking instead of kicking) and rankin, dante's player said "wait there wait there, we have to block the fanart tag for one day!"

- ANFITRIÃO (the host) EXISTS FOR GOD'S SAKE

- o segredo na ilha where amelie, beamons character entered in a fight with Pedrinho she just said keeped calling him POOR

- Sinais do outro lado LITERALLY has a FUCKING room full of paranormal cratures that is a fucking THE OFFICE REFERENCE

- sinais do outro lado characters SMOKE WEED CANONICLY and canonicly they fucking HIDED WEED FROM THE POLICE

- this same cast spended 10/20 minutes discussing what to do with the body of a dead COW

- lírio getting sad that his "friend" chico was hanging out with another guy said with this words that i will translate to you "seeing chiquinho hanging out with somebody taller and bigger then me makes me sad"

- cellbit made agatha nickname the MAIN ANTAGONIST OF ORDEM PARANORMAL, broxa aka ERECTAL DISFUCTION GUY

Any way what i want to say is foolish will be a great fit for ordem because besides him being really into the project he is silly and ordem is silly and if cellbit wants him to scar him to live he will

Come down and enjoy the show that will be SATURDAY 18/6PM BRAZILIAN TIME!