what's wrong with Eddie Redmayne in CABARET? | about the response to his performance as the Emcee

introduction ow Jesus do you know what Eddie redm doesn't need to do is make his own drum roll sound effects that's for what oh my God hey v b Avenue welcome to my theater themed YouTube channel my name is Mickey Joe and I am obsessed with all things theater an obsession that I Endeavor to channel through my work as a professional theater critic here on social media but one that also occasionally drives me to mindboggling frustration and I am sitting here today wearing a party hat because if I read what more hot take about Eddie Redman's performance and characterization of the MC in Cabaret or what that character is meant to represent within the context of the show without any kind of acknowledgement of the fact that what they're judging is a Tony Awards clip taken out of context or that you know they haven't actually seen the entire performance in the context of the show I'm going to lose my entire mind or for those that have seen the show an acknowledgement that art and bik extension theater and by extension musical theater and this particular production of Cabaret is inherently subjective I've Loved theater my entire life and I spent long enough teaching mathematics to know the difference one of those things usually has right answers and the other one doesn't which means that your interpretation of what the MC represents within Cabaret is completely valid but Rebecca fal's interpretation of what the MC represents within Cabaret is also valid Eddie redm as a performer his interpretation of what the MC represents in Cabaret with within that material is also valid so is mine so is everyone else's which also implies that everyone is allowed to have an opinion on this topic however there's a difference between an opinion which is informed and an opinion which is not and I don't mean educated and I don't mean that you know you're only allowed to talk about this if you've seen the show because there is an inherent sort of restriction within that there is an inherent price Factor this of course gives way to a wider conversation about the accessibility and affordability of Bradway and theater and the West end but I do think that it's a great idea for us to use enough of our vocabulary to articulate that you know I'm talking about the Tony Awards clip here and I haven't actually seen the show anyway all of this frustration and mounting noise on social media made me want to really dive into this performance and talk about how it's been perceived because there was a significant difference between how Eddie red M's performance and the entire production really was revived when it first opened in London and then subsequently when it transferred to Broadway he won the Olivier Award for best actor in a musical in the UK he did not win the Tony so while social media ties itself in knots on whether or not they think Eddie redm is good in this show we are going to take a very forensic look at everything that's happened so far with this revival and with the history of this character as well we're going to talk briefly about previous interpretations we're going to talk about how the character is situated within this particular Revival of the show and like I said we're going to look at how Eddie redm has been reviewed throughout the production's history along the way we will stop off on such conversational topics as what happens when we view the MC as a queer character and is that a component of this particular production and Eddie Redman's performance we're also going to ask such broad questions as what actually is a performance and is it the responsibility of just one individual I.E the actor spoiler alert it's not so if you're looking for a needlessly extensive Deep dive video essay about Eddie Redman's performance in cabet as well as a larger instructive video about theater criticism and art then you've come to the right place if you enjoy today's video make sure to subscribe to my theater themed YouTube channel if this is the first video that you're seeing from me I make many many videos about theater both in the West End and on Broadway talking about breaking theatrical news hot takes such as this one but largely reviewing the shows that I have been invited to go and see which has included Cabaret many times in fact a few days ago I was at the most recent garet performance of this particular production which continues to run in the West End and if anyone is interested then I'm happy to make a video talking about what I think of the new performers in the roles in London today however let's talk about Eddie redm but first let's talk about the history of the MC and the history of Cabaret now I've made so many videos about this particular production that I feel like I've told you this many times but let me give you the history of the role a quick overview of the history of this musical and how it first arrived to the stage so Cabaret first premiered on Broadway in 1966 featuring a book by Joe masterov and a score by John kander and Fred e who are best known if not for Cabaret than for the Musical Chicago cab is based on the 1951 play I am a camera which is in turn based on the 1939 Christopher isherwood novel good bite Berlin as such the whole thing is semi-autobiographical and it follows a protagonist named cliff who is an American writer who has traveled across Europe and finds himself on route to Berlin he is hoping to find some sort of inspiration within the city that will inspire his next book before he has arrived in Berlin however the KitKat Club has already been recommended to him as the hottest spot in the city and when he attends he meets its singer Sally balls Sally is a British girl living something of a naive hedonistic lifestyle but she is not the only personality that he meets within the Kit Kat Club setting because as he tells us in the plays final moments there was a nightclub in a city called Berlin and there was a Master of Ceremonies the MC now the nature of the show's material structurally is that we alternate between this narrative in which we see cliff and Sally living together together and trying to get by financially there is a subplot involving Cliff's land lady a woman named frine Schneider and another Resident of the rooms that she rents with whom she has a sort of an ongoing romantic connection the backdrop to all of this being the changing political climate in 1930s Germany and the rise of Nazism but like I was saying this is alternated with Musical vignettes that take place within the KitKat club which are largely performed by the MC now aside from a small handful of the Kit Kat Club dancers the MC is really the only named character who does not exist outside of this world he largely does not participate in these book scenes and only exists within the context of the Kit Kat Club and we don't get to know that much about him not nearly as much as we do about these other characters each of them have desires and motivations and beliefs and challenges that we come to find out an awful lot about and we don't get any of that with the MC he just sings songs he remains a vivid character however who exacts this biting political comedy on the situations that we see unfolding within the book scenes performing songs like if you could see her which is a sendup of you know the perspective of the community at the time of relationships of non-jews with Jews in 1930s Germany with anti-Semitism On The Rise Prezi rule that particular song takes place in the second act while everything is taking a turn for the slightly more dark and intense uh in the First Act he sings a more light-hearted song called two ladies poking fun at Sally and Cliff's very novel very modern at the time living Arrangement now when Cabaret first opened the MC was played by Joel gray who subsequently reped his role in the Bob fosy directed film version which starred Liza Manelli and was heavily different for a handful of reasons but what's particularly interesting about Joel Gray's performance in the original Broadway production is that he was nominated for and won the Tonio award but I bet you can't guess which category in or maybe you can cuz there aren't that many options but it was best featured actor in a musical not leading actor which Eddie redm has recently been nominated for now why might this be well the exact technicality around this is that a performer is automatically considered leading within a musical if their name is listed above the title any performers who are not listed above the title are considered featured this is then discussed by atonio Wards committee and they may make rulings and amendments uh to rectify things that they don't necessarily agree with but for whatever reason it was Jack Guilford and L Lena as ha Schultz and frine Schneider who were nominated for lead actor and lead actress and a musical in that original production and Joel gry was nominated in featured now we do see discrepancies in the ways that these roles are interpreted by awarding bodies as either leading or featured uh changing over time also changing between the UK and the US I'm reminded of a recent example where Sharon D Clark was considered leading in Death of a Salesman here in the UK at the Olivia Awards and when that same production transferred to Broadway the role was considered featured the latter of which I actually agree with in any case when Cabra was revived in 1987 and Joel gray again reprised his performance at the drama desks because he wasn't eligible for the Tony Awards CU he'd won already for the same role uh he was then considered to be a lead actor and by the time the show was being revived in London at the donmar warehouse in 1993 with Alan playing the role of the MC the Olivier agreed and he was also nominated for lead actor in a musical but he didn't win not in the UK anyway when Allan and the production transferred to Broadway he also won the Tony this time for lead and before we even get into the reviews there's an immediate parallel we can see there where Alan Cummings performance won the Tony award but not the Olivier Eddie red Ms having done the opposite and it's worth pointing out and I've said this before in other videos that that production had far more cultural impact and staying power in the US than it did in the UK it ran in a small what technically feels like an off-west end venue the Don Warehouse here in London for a limited period it was filmed but this revival the Sam Mendes directed Revival had far more of an extensive life in New York it ran on Broadway it was subsequently remounted years later with Alan again reprising his performance it Tau the us and not unlike the ongoing Revival of Chicago it sort of became the way in which Cabaret was seen for many American Theater goers if you were thinking of cab you were thinking about the Aesthetics and the direction choices of this production so much so that the MC has since been collectively reframed as a queer character which if we go back to the original material is not necessarily the case I say not necessarily because as I mentioned before we don't really get any insight into the MC's own personal choices and political affiliations even because everything is sort of quite tongue-in cheek and playful and nefarious but a lot of is left open to interpretation the interpretation of a director and the interpretation of a performer in any case between those two things the choice to reframe the MC as a queer character seemed to take place when Alan took on the role in that Sam Mendes directed production and from what I can tell this was largely achieved via three different things the first being Aesthetics and costuming Alan Cummings MC is dressed in a more suggestive way with kind of like braces up top but nothing else going on it's a more risque and Visually quick coded interpretation of the character compared with how Joel gray looked but the other two choices that this production made occurred at specific moments the first takes place during the song two ladies in which the two ladies that the MC is performing a playful musical threesome with are played by one female and one male member of the KitKat Club Ensemble this though still a pasti musical number performed within the context of entertainment in the Kit Kat Club kind of suggests the bisexuality or the queerness at least of the MC but if these are considered more tenuous references there are something much more specific that this production did later on and this is a spoiler but it's a spoiler for the Sam Mendes directed version of the show which is not currently playing anywhere because the final moments of Cabaret have been realized very differently in different Productions and in this one they chose to make a very visceral statement about the impact of you know the Nazis coming to power on many of the show's characters including the MC who up until the end of the show hadn't really been existing within the reality of Nazi Germany only within the concept of the KitKat club and so at the end of the S Mendes production the MC removes a coat to reveal costuming Familiar of the prisoners at awit or at the very least of a Nazi concentration camp and there are two emblems as seen on this uniform one of them indicates uh a gold star that the MC is a Jewish character the other a pink triangle indicates that he was a homosexual so this makes a very strong and very clear statement about the MC's sexual identity and this framing has sort of lingered in various other Productions that have come afterwards there is a sense of this in Rufus Norris's uh Revival in London in 2006 that subsequently tore to the UK extensively there are references within that to the MC as a queer character and a similarly blistering final sequence that doesn't do the same sort of explicit things but also depict the MC as being a victim of the Nazi race regime and specifically of the Holocaust but what's interesting in all of this is it has kind of seeped into the collective Consciousness that I feel we now consider the MC to be an inherently and specific queer character to the point that I'm seeing people this week making Tik toks talking just as a given about the MC as this queer character that we meet and that's not necessarily explicit within the material there is also the consideration that the MC has very often been played by queer performers which is just another interesting tip tidbit whether or not they were publicly queer at the time of playing the role but for whatever reason it does seem to skew very heavily and this is perhaps linked to the fact that it seems to be Alan cumming's performance as the MC that is best remembered in so many of these conversations I'm seeing unfolding about Eddie redm it there are so many comparisons invoked to Alan cummings's performance and he did it for a great many years on Broadway and he repressed the role on Broadway and it's been captured on film but it's interesting that the original performer of the role who also reprised it in a subsequent Revival and was in the film adaptation which is not something that necessarily happens often the original Broadway star reprising their role on film dear ofan Hansen notwithstanding Joel gray is not more closely linked to the enduring Legacy of the MC that people kind of remember the Alan version and I can't imagine that all of these people thinking of Alan as the MC have all necessarily watch the domma warehouse Pro Shot I dare say many have but there are so many theater people I'm seeing who just link Allan to it inherently and not Joel anyway this story ends with yet another London Revival of Cabaret this time at the Playhouse theater which is reconceived as the KitKat Club in a Revival that will'll see the audience arrive through this semi-immersive setting with a pre-show element performed by a prologue company of performers that situates them within 1930s Berlin inside the KitKat Club from the conception of this production Eddie redm was always a attached as the MC he opened the show in the West End he like I said won the Olivier Award for best leading actor in a musical subsequently the role has been played by actors including frari and John McCrae and Callum Scott hows and Jake shears Mason Alexander park most recently Leighton Williams also Luke Treadway I think that might be all of them sorry if I'm forgetting one did I forget an MC I've seen almost all of them but on the back of the show's enormous success of Broadway transfer was announced it headed to the August Wilson theater in New York a few years later where Eddie redm reprised his performance but as I mentioned at the beginning of this video the critical receptions to the two have been a little bit different so let's take a look at the reviews now I've done a lot of these review Roundup videos before where I the West End reviews haven't really been able to personally weigh in but with this one I can and quite specifically because I have now seen this production nine times I have seen three different Productions of Cabaret with my eyeballs in my lifetime across three different countes R I have seen a handful I think also nine different actors playing the role of the MC and I have seen Eddie Redman's performance in this show live with my eyeballs three different times I saw the opening night performance of the show in the West End when it was reviewed by the majority of London critics I saw a subsequent West End performance with Eddie redm in just like a random night of the week and I saw a Broadway press preview also attended by many New York critics and I'm not suggesting that my opinion comes with any kind of an inherent superiority I am just saying I have seen the damn show and I think that's important now when I first saw it in the West End I really enjoyed Eddie Red Man's performance and you know I think I also went into it thinking of the role from the perspective of being a queer character and being a little surprised by his casting and I don't think I was necessarily that convinced by it before I saw the thing but by the time I did see it I thought it was a masterful acting performance I thought it was this chameleon transformation and it was the extent of the characterization of his voice and of his physicality and how transformative the whole thing was and how much he disappeared into this character that really struck me there is a moment towards the end of the show where he is the MC who has been sort of undergoing a visual transformation throughout the thing and becomes more conservatively dressed and begins to Dawn a blond wig and sort of you know is becoming more a part of the fascist ideal of what Germany would look like the whole Aryan thing but he as the MC is playing the train conductor on the train that Cliff is taking to leave Germany having become disillusioned with its political climate and with the people who he has met and there is a moment where Eddie as the MC went from being the train conductor to going back to being the MC and there was this kind of physical change where he hunched over slightly and his eyes CH it was it still haunts me enduringly and it it's never been committed to in quite the same way by any of the subsequent performers in the role because they never really transformed as much there was not as much vocal affectation there was not as much of an accent there was not the same extent of physicality he does a lot of acting in this like it's demonstrable big acting and big characterization For Better or For Worse let's take a look at the other reviews that are not things said by me so this was a four-star review in the guardian back when it opened and let's specifically have a look at what was said about Eddie redm from the moment we have Vil come in by redm Ed is clear he is in control of his material and Electric in his part as the soiled soul of Bin red M's MC mirrors the movement from light to dark he has a comically twisted Rumple stilt skin at the start uncoiling to a finger resembling the terrible evil fairy or angel of death by the end he gives an immense physicalized performance both muscular and delicate from his curled limbs to his tly expressive fingertips and such as the praise for this performance that in the final paragraph of this review I returns to him and says red M creeps around the fringes of the stage when he is not performing watching scenes from afar if this show is sold on his star turn we get more than our money's worth with his blinding performance in this Blinder of a show and that was how it was thought of at the time that they were selling Eddie redm in Cabaret and the thing has now evolved from a producing perspective where they are selling the show which they have to because you know he left the London production and other people took over and the show continues to run and they bring in consistently exciting stuff are casting currently in the show is Leighton Williams and R Norwood but there's something ARA said right at the start of that that I dare say other critics touched on and we may see again but I want to expand on it a little bit because she characterizes him as the soul of Belin the soiled soul of Berlin and it's that that I believe and again my interpretation ARA's interpretation of Eddie and Rebecca freel's interpretation it's that that I think the MC represents in this production of the show there are versions where the MC is representative of perhaps the queer Community perhaps the queer cultural nlife perhaps the MC is just an individual who is as affected by Nazism as everyone else is in the show but having seen this multiple times what I'm consistently inferring from the costuming choices and the way that the MC evolves and the way that the MC is utilized within this particular production is that he represents the soul of the country one that Cliff encounters as being sort of playful and suggestive but welcoming to him and Rye with a little bit of menace to it that Menace becomes more palpable and he becomes less playful he becomes more traditional more conservative and he starts to look like the fascist ideal and so where we are seeing commentary about his performance being a little bit subhuman it may be because in this production he's not really playing an individual he is playing someone emblematic of the entire country and there's always been something a little bit alien about his performance as well he is this sort of a creature rather than a person I want to quickly sidebar about something that one of my friends uh Ben who is Broadway Ben on Tik Tok pointed out recently about the evolution of the makeup in the West End version of the show that subsequent actors who have played the role always wear more and more makeup and that Eddie red M never really wore that much and while I think largely it has been about personal expression for each actor in the role and it hasn't been more makeup each time there's just been a trend where we've seen many actors recently who have worn more makeup as the MC I don't think it's about sexuality I think it has more to do with gender and alleviating a sense of gender for the MC because I think the MC is really more of a creature here and not a man I don't think the MC is meant to feel like one real tangible male person in this production I think the more that they can do to smooth over the confines of gender expression the more that that is conveyed but I don't think that enough of a gender exists there as a prerequisite through which we can gaze a concept of the MC sexuality not in this production not really anyway let's take a look at some more West End reviews now this is interesting because this is David Benedict in Variety in 2021 he notes at the beginning the revivals of the show ever since uh Liza's casting in the Oscar winning film have leaned towards being all about Sally uh and then with Sam Mendes's version it became all about the MC with Alan but he notes that the Triumph of director Rebecca frel stunner of a production is that despite piercing performances from Jesse Buckley and Eddie redm her supremely intelligent emotionally draining vision of the show turns it enthrallingly into all about Berlin red M's highly stylized MC is a cross between a gleaming lean and Savage ring Master and King Le it's very definitely a performance with a capital A and a capital p uh which goes with what I was saying before about it like it's a lot of acting um but it's also utterly at one with the heightened tone of the club and other than commenting about his sort of political positioning within the show that's really all that David Benedict has to say about Eddie Redman's performance but the rest of the thing is filled with praise about this revival now here is Matt wolf in the New York Times but reviewing the London production in 2021 red M's MC brings his own distinctly shape shift sinuous quality to a role that can be hard to refresh many still associate it with a pancake faed Joel gry who originated the part on stage and won an Oscar in the 1972 Bob fossy film limping or crouching his way about the circular stage a Twitchy red M initially calls to mind A demented marionette his mouth as misshapen as his psyche we're going to come back to that marionette thing don't let me forget it he first emerges in a burst of light his body contorted during the startling opening number Vil come in a party hat clinging to the side of his tilted head life is beautiful he says but something about the grally voice and glazed smile suggest otherwise appearing bare chested soon after in the manic number two ladies and the costuming has since changed and he's now kind of portraying Sally but in a cheaper drag version red M's MC is a devotee of debauchery whose true character is revealed in the anti-semitic finish to if you could see her when a nasty slur comes as the song's brutal kicker that I don't necessarily know about that kind of feels like a slight misunderstanding of what that number represents because I don't think that's meant to be an inference as to the MC's character or own uh opinions I don't think that's the MC's true character I think that's the MC uh poking fun at anti-Semitism existing in the time anyway red Main's lyric tenner lends itself well to tomorrow belongs to me I at the time was surprised how great he sounded singing that song the melodic Nazi Anthem that sounds sweet enough until you grasp the lyrics the song prefigures a moral decline that reaches an idea in the MC's second act solo I don't care much with that number cut from the original production but reinstated for various revivals the MC's assimilation into the Third Reich is complete so the marionette thing is something that's been talked about a lot recently because it was this Tony Awards performance of vilin where everyone was commenting on firstly that he looked deeply Sinister and demonic right and then also that he was moving in a very contrived and unusual way and I don't know if on screen people are just inherently more predisposed to enjoying performances that are naturalistic and believable and sort of conditioned to think that acting is what looks realistic but the Counterpoint to all of this that I've seen being made is people talking about his movement as being this marionette type quality and true enough like it comes across the way that he moves it feels very Judy and it seems as though it is meant to look like he is being puppeteered like he is just a porn in the whole political thing right but even beyond that there's a cleverness to it and if one good thing came out of this whole annoying internet discourse it's that David Gordon from theater Mania pointed out that there is a particular pose Eddie redm is doing at the beginning where he is creating the visual of a swastika with his body which I having seen the show a bunch of times had not picked up on and I think is insane insane in like a good I can't believe they're doing that on stage that's such a ridiculous beautiful detail way but insane nonetheless here's another review this is five stars in The Independent for that first London opening from Alexander polard enter Eddie redm as the MC an impish Mercurial presence who serves as both compare of the Cabaret and a sort of allseeing narrator in the strange and seductive opening number vilmen he promises an escape from The Real World but his gning presence becomes more disturbing his songs are metor for the darkening soul of Germany as it descends in Nazism red m is excellent contorting his seny body and singing with a closed throated vibrat and hammed up German accent now I could go on and find more of these and there's at least one more that sort of was the most significant dissenting opinion from what I remember of reading the reviews at the time but what we're hearing in all of them is praise for his physicality and the characterization and the pronounced shift to the more Sinister but also the foreshadowing of the Sinister characterization from the beginning the hint of something behind the eyes that it's it's not all quite as as as happy and vcom and and life is beautiful as he claims but further to that there is this slight sense of without using the word that it might be slightly contrived they call it a hammed up German accent David Benedict I think it was called it a performance with a capital P that the whole thing is a little bit broad we'll remember that as we cross the pond and look at the New York reviews but first the last one I wanted to read now this is from exient now this was written by Frey qua Hawking and from what I remember was like I said the sort of the main dissenting opinion of the time that this was not a glorious Revival of the show which is an oversimplification of what they said in this review and I encourage you to go and read it for yourself but we're going to scan through and look for what was said specifically about Eddie redm it's clear that Eddie redm is playing his MC as Sinister clown even before his Immaculate red Puro costume he's the Crooked spine of the production redm habitually hunches over but straightens up frequently enough to let us know he's not going for a character with a disability just one who likes to hunch that did strike me as a little unusual when I first saw it but I got used to it this feels like a result both of red M's early attachment to this project and irresist of the long shadow of Sam Mendes's of revived 1993 production with Alan Cummings androgynous arch orchestrator of events red Main's performance is more like Joel Gray's original Broadway MC in his sexlessness than Cummings little squirmer but without the camp of either even when it comes to money which is not my favorite part of this production I will say it's chewy and grimacing and unchallenging with a lot of very literal conducting the angle seems to be consciously playing on the actor's age resistant slightly haunted doll looks but feels unsettled rather than unsettling now this is a hot take I don't think an MC who doesn't read as particularly and a queer slur has been used here in a reclaimed way but I won't repeat it necessarily uh does much for caburet even with the character's role embodying of the changing Spirit of berin which is what we talked about not when it all feels more circus or freak Show themed than CD dive why set it in the club at all which is a very interesting take and I think that opens a lot of interesting conversations but I do want to go back to the comparison to Joel gray because like I said that's something I feel like has been missing in a lot of this conversation that that may be the interpretation of the MC to which this Bears more of a similarity than the Allen cuming one that is closer to the Forefront of everyone's Minds for some reason I say for some reason it makes sense for American audiences because he did a lot on Broadway in the more recent history for international theater fans I don't know why Alan more closely associated than Joel gry Still and it's worth saying I don't necessarily agreee with everything that's written here but I do think think it's a very interesting take on the situation and in any case Less Than 3 years later the show opened in New York with Eddie redm repressing his performance let's read what the Broadway critics had to say so let's start with the Broadway reviews Jesse Green in the New York Times perhaps the most influential uh review within the current Broadway community and he had an awful lot to say about the production and there did seem to be something of an immediate hang-up on the whole retheming of the theater and the entrance into the building I think a lot of critics had issues with this production before they'd even arrived to it now after several paragraphs of complaint he acknowledges uh that some of the Productions many fine and entertaining moments feature its West End star Eddie redm as the maab MC of the KitKat club and quite likely your nightmares foreshadowing the Tweet about him being a sleep paralysis demon on the Tony Awards so you know Jesse Green called that one uh next talks about uh Eddie Red made a few paragraphs later having said the the point of Sally and of cab more generally is to dramatize the danger of disengagement from reality not to fetishize it and I don't know if I think that's the point of Cabaret it's an interpretation of Cabaret not the point uh he goes on to say the gut's first problem also distorts red M's MC but at least that character was always intended as allegorical he is the host to anything The aoral Shape Shifter becoming whatever he must to get by here he begins as a kind of marionette in a leather skirt and Tiny party hat it's actually shorts um it's not a leather skirt but again neither here nor there hiccuping his way through vilin later he effectively incarnates himself as a creepy clown an undead skeleton Sally's twin and a glossy Nazi which is a lot of commentary on how he's dressed in the show but Jesse Green is a theater critic and not a fashion one so I'm hoping we have more to say about his actual performance I'm not convinced that we do I mean he talks an awful lot about sort of the soul of this production and of the material and how the two sort of don't really align for him uh but I don't think much more is said about Eddie redm specifically let's see what variety had to say now this was written by naen Kuma now both of the Publications that we've looked at so far both spoke positively about Eddie Redman's performance albeit under different writers when the show opened in the West End let's take a read the stripped down Humanity on stage from the entrails of broken lovers to the dancers carnal gyration make red M's MC a j ing exception an otherworldly salamander of a narrator he hunches over gollem likee gnawing on every syllable as if it were his last meal it's a fiercely committed performance but a mannered one too for the MC to exist as a creature apart makes narrative sense but red M's remoteness drains some of the force from what is otherwise a grounded gut punching take on a disturbingly timely story interesting let's go now to theator Mania which I mentioned before now this was reviewed by Zachary Stewart Red Man's MC is a fantastic Beast minus the Fantastic he contorts his face twists his fingers and hunches his back like he's about to ring the bell in the maranne k a sweaty Twitchy animatronic he makes Alan cuming look subtle where previous MC's seduced you into the party's dark room before punching you in the gut Red Man Comes Out Swinging he's someone you would encounter once and spend the rest of your life actively avoiding then also talks about um all of the costuming uh and notes Frankel seems to want the MC to represent the soul of Germany which is a fair enough choice but she has little to say about why people like cliff and Sally were attracted to that soul in the first place I think that Broadway critics didn't find Eddie Redman's MC initially charming and yeah that's a little inexplicable to me because having seen the performance in the West End and on Broadway and it had shifted slightly and I'll tell you more about why in a moment um but I've consistently thought that it's very inviting it's very welcoming and it's a little seductive in a very unusual way but he gets laughs very easily and he charms the audience very easily and in this whole layout I mean they've spent the pre-show being seduced into the world of the club as soon as he arrives it's this sort of a stark set and it's sort of a tense introduction there's a prolonged silence and there's an uncomfortable element to it and there's a tension that he has to break which he does and gets a laugh for doing so cuz that's what happens when you alleviate tension people laugh in relief and during that opening mon section some of the dialogue from which is then repeated exactly later and turned on its head with a completely different tone he is very charming and he does manage to win over the audience so I'm surprised that that didn't come across with so many of the reviews that we are reading now I mentioned I would say how I thought the performance had changed and in general because the August Wilson theater is more expansive than the Playhouse theater they've both become the KitKat Club in New York and London respectively for this Production Red M's performance is just one of many ways in which the whole thing feels a little bit broader and a little bit bigger and I think he had the opportunity to play things in a smaller subtler way bear in mind he knows well the difference between playing to a camera and playing to a theater he's had experience plenty of experience of doing both in this larger space the whole thing is being played bigger now let's also take a look at Johnny olinsky's thoughts in the New York per he gave cab two and a half stars out of four which I would say again as I say every time is a weird metric it's also basically a three out of five why are you still doing it out of four it's not up to him specifically it just annoys me he also took objection to the Revival generally and notes that he was also an outlier having seen the London production he says it was rapturously received by critics except for me also that exient review that we read and a little bit of wisdom here perhaps from Mr alexinsky because he said red M's MC is sure to divide opinion and here we are sure enough just as New York audiences will have trouble shaking their love of Sam Mendes's ingenious Revival that ran on Broadway for years so too will they struggle to forget Alan in the role not to mention Joel gray in the film and it's those inherently inescapable performances that I think Eddie redm has had to contend with here and I think honestly those go most of the way towards answering the question of why are people struggling with his interpretation of the role so much but dressed like a demon clown red M long and excellent stage actor makes the part very much his own he's creepy and has The Smiling stalker stare of a horror movie serial killer and still we're pleased whenever he's around he got the Charming thing if only he was in a better Cabaret and that's a different conversation for another time about this revival and the different perspectives to it a lot of which I think can also be answered by the more recent Broadway production directed by Sam Mendes and the love for that and perhaps slight reluctance from the critics to let that one go in favor of really being fair to this new inter ation but again different conversation and so I think on balance what we're still hearing here is a lot of admitted praise being leveled in the direction of Eddie redm and you know he got the Tony award nomination his performance was not criticized as heavily as the Revival on the hall was director Rebecca frel did not get a Tony nomination among a very competitive year I will say for directors in musicals but for a lot of the difference in critical reception that there's been to the show and to Red M's performance with some reviews s of of framing it in a different way they are essentially saying very similar things they're all talking in metaphors and characterizing his performance as being demonic or the impish or he's this hunched over figure this creature for some the initial inviting grin Works others don't really see the charm in that as we've mentioned I would love for people to really dig into the specificities of his performance because something that I heard a lot just around town in New York was criticism of his singing voice and this slight strangled quality I privately heard a theater critic say that he thought he sounded like Kermit the Frog and found that to be very off-putting and I can hear that I can but I also think that for me it invoked the sort of old timey radio voice and redm himself has said about his slightly contrived German accent that it's sort of non-specific European because he invokes more of an idea than a specific personality and something else I want to talk about here is having seen this production with many different actors subsequently in the West End red M has yet to be replaced on Broadway but that will be happening later this year cuz he's only attached to the Revival for a limited time no one else goes as hard as he does with the characterization they all portray the same role and they have the same change in costuming and the same general Arc and the production is the same I don't know how many of the subsequent cast members were actually directed by Rebecca frall personally but Eddie redm in terms of the affectations in terms of the movements and how specifically inhuman he feels he feels less naturalistic he feels more contrived it feels more like a very broad performance than anyone who has come in the role after him I also think though some have got incredibly close in particular Mason Alexander park who I thought was extraordinary in the show uh no one's really lived up to Eddie Redman's version of the character and it was built around him and shaped around him so that makes sense but that brings us to the ongoing discourse about his ton Ward's performance which I will talk about just a little bit now so there are a lot of things that I think are missing in this conversation but let me tell you how we got here and what I'm referring the Tony Awards performance to so Eddie having been nominated for the Tony award for best leading actor in a musical and the production having been nominated for the Tony award for best Revival of a musical he performed vilin on the Tony Awards which makes sense because he is still the star of this production as the production continues in London they've been doing this Dual Star thing and occasionally the Sally is a bigger name like recently with k deine occasionally the MC is a bigger name uh certainly right now with the Broadway opening Eddie redm is the biggest name as he was when they opened it in the west end with him opposite Jesse Buckley he is now playing opposite Gail Rankin in New York but given all of that it made a lot of sense for them to do vilcom in what the audience at the Tony Awards uh aside from those who had seen the show and the audience at home watching the broadcast again aside from those who had seen the show didn't really get to appreciate it the context of the entire production and so so you know they're trying to understand what this performance is without context and context is important it's why I spend so long talking at the start of these videos context matters because it tells us where we are and that is important for understanding any interpretation the key thing here and we've said it a lot already is Eddie Redman's MC is acting this way and behaving in this slightly peculiar slightly Sinister manner because of what his character represents within this concept for the show that is dissimilar to Concepts that you may have seen in previous Productions that's the thing and that's the reason why it makes it difficult to comment on the thing without having seen the performance in context I also want to talk about what a performance is and this is something I've said before and I believe staunchly because a performance is not the creation of an actor a performance like almost anything else like everything else in the world of theater is a collaborative act a performance is a collaboration between at minimum actor and director you also often have to consider vocal coach acting coach stage scene Partners uh dialect coaches all sorts of other people like the rest of the creative Team all going into this musical directors uh movement coaches so many different things intimacy coordinators all of these people are together crafting this performance but principally it is a collaboration between actor and director and that is another dimension that I think is being left out of this conversation when we just reduce it to is Eddie redm good or not and it's does the performance being given here which is the co-creation of Eddie redm as the actor and Rebecca frel as the Director does that align with your understanding of what Cabaret is which is shaped by whatever experience you've had with it whether you've only ever seen the film whether you've only ever seen the Sam Mendes version which whether you've seen a bunch of regional versions whether you did it in college and have huge attachment to it because of that whatever that may be does this align with your understanding of it do you readily enjoy it with or without context um and unfortunately all of that is a lot more nuanced than just sharing a hot take on social media whether it's X whether it's Tik Tok it's difficult without sitting down and making an incredibly long video like I've just done here to really properly get into the meat of this thing I feel like there's still so much more that we could say about his performance about this production in general about the history of this role but I also think that that could be considered excessive so for now I feel like that's all that I have to say about it and get the thing out of my system in any case this having become a source of debate on social media I would love to hear what you all have to say in the comments section down below especially if you've seen his performance if you saw it in London if you've seen it on Broadway if you've seen any of those other historic MC performances before if you have a particular Insight based on anything that I've said in today's video let me know all of your thoughts and feelings in the comments section in the meantime I hope that you enjoyed today's video if you found all of the noise about his performance as maddening as I have then perhaps this has been cathartic or enlightening for you I don't know if you enjoyed it make sure to subscribe to my channel there's a button somewhere below this YouTube video where you can turn on notifications then YouTube will let you know when I am sharing new videos I have many exciting reviews coming soon um as well as some other hot takes and news all of the usual stuff you can also go and find me on other social media platforms I Mickey Joe theater on X on Tik Tok and on Instagram and I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagy day for 10 more seconds I'm Micky Joe theater oh my God hey thanks for watching have a stagey day subscribe