http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/michelle-williams-cabaret-broadway/#1Michelle Williams Is Back on Broadway—
and Starring in Cabaretby Adam Green
March 31, 2014 10:00a.m.
Practice Makes Perfect: Williams, between rehearsals, in a Cadolle bustier. Velvet coat
from New York Vintage Inc. VBH ring with black diamonds. Boots from Early Halloween, NYC.
Hair: Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon. Makeup, Angela Levin for Chanel Beauté. Fashion Editor:
Phyllis Posnick. Production design, Piers Hanmer
Photographed by Craig McDean, Vogue, April 2014 Michelle Williams may be a movie star, but she got her start on the boards with a
San Diego youth theater, appearing in
The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and
Sleeping Beauty. At ten, she performed a solo turn in a show-tune revue, taking center stage to belt the defiant title anthem from
Cabaret, the 1966 musical about nightlife and Nazism in Weimar Berlin. “I’ve thankfully blocked out most of the details,” Williams says now, “but I do remember that I sang a very cheery version of the song—and that I wore a sequined tuxedo jacket.”
Some 23 years later, the Oscar-nominated star of
Brokeback Mountain, Blue Valentine, and
My Week with Marilyn is getting another crack at the number—minus the sequins—as she makes her Broadway debut in the
Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival. Which is why a recent afternoon finds her in a
Times Square rehearsal studio running through
“Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many gems from
Kander and Ebb’s mordantly jazzy score. Sitting next to an upright piano and wearing a pointy wool cap, a slouchy T-shirt, patterned leggings, and T-strap Capezios, Williams looks more like a hipster elf turned chorus girl than one of the most radiantly beautiful and gifted screen actresses of our time. But she’s clearly in her element. “I love this room—I love that it has no mirrors, and I love the lack of self-consciousness that lives in it,” she says. “I imagine a sign over the door that says, Mistakes Are Made Here. With movies, each day you carve something in stone. This is a changing, moving, breathing thing that nobody can pin you to—and that’s a new sensation for me.”
Newness is precisely what Williams brings to this Cabaret, a re-creation of
Sam Mendes and
Rob Marshall’s Tony-winning 1998 revival, with
Alan Cumming reprising his lascivious and sinister turn as the epicene
Emcee, who bids us
“Willkommen,” and
Studio 54 once again standing in for the seedy
Kit Kat Klub, a symbol of the frenzied decadence that eased the way for Germany’s descent into madness. Williams’s acting is marked both by its invisibility and by the almost reckless courage with which she inhabits woundedness. It’s hard to imagine anyone bringing a fresher, more penetrating take to
Sally Bowles, a wayward English songbird with a bruised spirit who takes up with a bisexual American writer (
Bill Heck) and ruins everything. “She has a vulnerability and fragility—but also a kind of steeliness—that I find fascinating,” says Cumming of his costar. “She’s always completely in the moment, and because of that you believe every word that comes out of her mouth.”
Though it’s a role that’s already been claimed by
Liza Minnelli (who won an Oscar as Sally in
Bob Fosse’s 1972 film version) and reinvented by
Natasha Richardson (who won a Tony for her heartbreaking performance in the earlier revival), Williams is undaunted. “A friend told me that when Natasha was debating whether or not to do this role, her mother said, ‘Darling, when they ask you to play Sally Bowles, you play Sally Bowles,’ ” she says. “So I pretended that
Vanessa Redgrave was my mother and followed her advice—who knows when the chance will come around again?”
Famous for her obsessive preparation, Williams spent four months before rehearsals working daily with singing and dancing coaches and immersing herself in the late-1920s world of
Christopher Isherwood, whose
Berlin Stories (along with
John Van Druten’s stage adaptation
I Am a Camera) inspired the musical. She also studied performance footage of such chanteuses as
Marlene Dietrich and
Anita Berber and spent a couple of days in
Berlin walking the same streets of the
Schöneberg that Isherwood haunted, snapping iPhone pics of the apartments where he lived with
Jean Ross (his model for Sally Bowles) and spending evenings at Weimar-era dance halls and cabarets populated by aging strippers. “Berlin was the epicenter of sexual freedom,” Williams says. “Everything was permitted, all kinds were allowed—and I’m sure they were having a really great time before evil took root.”
Though loath to pin down the essence of her elusive character, Williams does allow that she’s caught a few glimmers. “She decides she’s going to be billed as ‘The Toast of Mayfair,’ ” Williams says. “That’s what’s going to separate her from the other girls, make her special. It suggests talent, success, elegance. But she’s really just a few steps up from a call girl.” If Sally’s self-deception makes her tragic, her willful blindness to the wider world makes her a symptom of something far worse. “She’s somebody who won’t look past herself,” Williams explains. “As she famously says in the play, ‘Politics? But what has that to do with us?’ At the end, she’s alone, singing onstage while the city burns around her, still waiting to become a star.”
Williams reconnected with her inner showgirl while rehearsing and filming a song medley for
My Week with Marilyn and has been keeping her eye out for a musical ever since. “Singing and dancing take you out of your head—you’re too busy doing too many other things to be thinking, How am I doing? You’re just doing. It’s like meditation. When
Cabaret came along, with these gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous songs—they’re so simple, but they tap into something deep and emotional—I knew that I wanted to follow that thing I tasted a few years ago.” And how’s that working out? “I haven’t been confronted with the nerves yet, so now the singing is just pure joy,” she says. “Honestly, it feels like being a kid. Now let’s see if I can be a kid onstage eight times a week.”
