'Cabaret' director Rebecca Frecknall on her production's fifth anniversary in the West End

Cabaret is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Director Rebecca Frecknall can’t wait to see what performers bring to this hit show next.

Summary

• Rebecca Frecknall is the director behind the long-running production of Cabaret in the West End
• The original company starred Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne as Sally Bowles and the Emcee
• Skylar Astin and Sarah Hyland star in the current cast

“There were times I honestly didn’t think we were going to open at all, let alone reach five years,” says Rebecca Frecknall of her multi-Olivier Award-winning Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club (aka the revamped Playhouse Theatre). Performances began in November 2021, in uncertain times, with the company still doing COVID tests every day in rehearsals. “The fact that I’m now watching our Year 6 ensemble is just incredible.”

Staging Cabaret was a lifelong dream for Frecknall. She first experienced John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Weimar Berlin-set musical as a child: her father, who had played the Emcee in a student production, adored the show and taped the televised version of Sam Mendes’s 1993 Donmar Warehouse revival. “It was one of my favourite things to watch,” says Frecknall. “Most people first encounter Cabaret as a movie, but I fell in love with it as a theatre show. I always wanted to direct it, so it was a ‘pinch me’ moment when it actually happened.”

That opportunity came about thanks to Eddie Redmayne. The actor revealed to Frecknall that he and Jessie Buckley had been cooking up plans for a revival and asked her to be part of it. “I thought ‘It’s a great idea, but we’ll never get the rights,’” says Frecknall. “Plus I was very green at that point – I’d never done a musical – so I thought there was no way a producer would give it to me.’” Frecknall didn’t hear anything for a year, but then finally it was a go: for both the revival and her as director.

Frecknall’s productions – such as her likewise acclaimed A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patsy Ferran and Paul Mescal – have won praise for allowing audiences to experience classic work afresh. That is certainly true of her stripped-back, immersive Cabaret. “I don’t tend to think in a way that’s concept driven,” she explains. “I think about what in the material are the most important things that I want to emphasise.” What excites her about Cabaret is its combination of “sexiness and danger, that it’s so raw and politically driven. It has such extraordinary power and emotional catharsis.”

She had some helpful starting points for her production: she knew the theatre would be reconfigured to play in the round with cabaret tables, and that there would be a performance-based prologue. “I started having conversations with our brilliant designer Tom Scutt about how to take the audience on this atmospheric journey. We welcome them into our underground club and into the party, and then by the end you realise the world you’re part of has irrevocably changed. We want to leave the audience with a shudder.”

Cabaret, with its dire warning about the rise of fascism, continues to be sadly pertinent – one of many reasons why the West End production still grips audiences. “John Kander told me they thought they were making something that was just resonant in the moment,” says Frecknall. “But the work still speaks directly to the way that humanity operates, and the terrible cost.”

Our Cabaret guide is the Emcee, played by Redmayne in eerie, physically distinctive fashion. “It’s a really difficult character – he’s more of an idea or a metaphor,” says Frecknall. “He is the club, he is Berlin, he is the impending threat. We were particularly interested in him as a shapeshifter: you don’t fully know which character is the real him. By the end he is the man in the suit with the blonde wig: he’s part of the homogenised regime, and he’s the puppetmaster controlling everyone. A lot of productions treat it as the Emcee’s tragedy. I wanted to frame it as the ensemble’s tragedy.”

Redmayne’s phenomenal co-star, Buckley, gave us a ferocious Sally. “I remember the first time she sang [the title number] in rehearsal,” says Frecknall. “Everyone stopped doing what they were doing and I realised ‘OK, this is going to be an incredible moment for her.’” Frecknall says their version of the number makes it “a choice song. Sally decides not to continue with her pregnancy and to stay in Berlin and go down with the ship. It’s this primal scream.”

Remarkably, the production has followed up that original company with a phenomenal series of recastings, including John McCrea, Maude Apatow, Mason Alexander Park, Rebecca Lucy Taylor, Jake Shears, Layton Williams, Marisha Wallace, and Billy Porter. “That was always our plan: doing these shorter runs with new casts,” says Frecknall. “People were nervous about it that first year, but now they understand it’s not a takeover – it’s a chance for a reimagining.”

Frecknall loves the fresh energy that brings to the show. “It feels so alive because we have people coming in and finding new things. We’ve had performers from all sorts of backgrounds, from the music industry to Broadway, and it plays to really varied audiences. That’s a joy.” Frecknall praises the current company, which includes Skylar Astin, Sarah Hyland and Ruthie Henshall, as “super strong. It’s so exciting to be going into our sixth year with amazing people still keen to come in and play these roles.”

The conversations about who might take up the mantle next are ongoing, says Frecknall: “I feel like I get to talk about new Sallys and Emcees every week! The show definitely feels like it’s got more life in it, and audiences who are loving it, so I hope it carries on for a long time to come. I can’t wait to see what its future holds.”

Book Cabaret tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

This article first appeared in the November 2026 issue of London Theatre Magazine.

Photo credit: Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley in the original company of Rebecca Frecknall's production of Cabaret, and current cast members Sarah Hyland and Skylar Astin. (Photos by Marc Brenner)