The man who made this Cabaret go round

10 April 2012

Before the glowing reviews for his revival of Cabaret came in this week, Rufus Norris was worried. The 41-year-old director, a two-time Evening Standard award-winner, has always blended the self-confidence necessary to inspire a company with a measure of self-doubt.

But with the West End looking increasingly like a bear-pit for competing musicals this autumn, Norris had real, career-shaking, money-losing cause for concern as his production of Kander and Ebb's classic edged towards opening night.

Halfway through previews, the 3.5 metre burning metal swastika that symbolised Nazi triumph over liberal Berlin at the show's end began pulling the lighting rig apart, and had to be abandoned. Norris had a blazing row with leading man Michael Hayden over the 11th-hour restructuring of a significant scene that wasn't working.

Early audiences sniggered at the first act nudity, an expression of Hitlerian body-worship echoed in a chilling second-act image of stripped concentration camp victims.

Then Anna Maxwell Martin, a musical novice on whom Norris had taken a gamble by casting her as the effervescently fragile showgirl Sally Bowles, collapsed.

"Anna picked up this virus about 10 days before press night," says Norris. "On the Monday she'd been sick and was feeling weak. She struggled on, losing energy all the time, and by Thursday her doctor said it wasn't possible for her to carry on."

An understudy stepped in that night, without proper rehearsal and wearing an ill-fitting costume, then Maxwell Martin "dragged herself in, did the Friday night very well, but by the end of the Saturday matinee she could barely stand".

During the show, Norris noticed her straying whenever possible towards a chair or a bed. "You know you've got problems if someone who's supposed to be the life and soul has to sit down to stop herself falling over," says Norris drily. He sent his leading lady home, calculating the cost of cancelling the press night three days hence, with blockbusters like Spamalot and crowdpleasers like Dirty Dancing thundering towards him ...

It was, as they say, all right on the night. Better than all right. This newspaper's critic Nicholas de Jongh praised Cabaret's "imperishable" songs and Norris's "inventive, musically vigorous production". The Guardian's Michael Billington called the show "one of the defining musicals of the post-war era", while The Independent's Paul Taylor dubbed Norris's production a "stunningly fresh and imaginative revival of a classic" and Maxwell Martin "the best and most crashingly accurate Sally Bowles to date".

Taylor suggested that not only had this new Cabaret seen off the twin spectres of Sam Mendes's 1993, Broadway-storming stage revival and the 1973 Liza Minnelli film, but that it might also trounce Andrew Lloyd Webber's forthcoming Sound of Music, ending his review with the sly paraphrase "bye bye mein lieber nun".

Rufus Norris is not one to crow, but I suspect he feels quietly vindicated. Having had a loving but peripatetic childhood, following his civil servant father around various African countries, Norris has always seemed to treat the theatre as an alternative, stable home, imbuing it with almost religious significance.

The fact that he first made his name with thoughtful, textured productions on the fringe and at the Young Vic, and that his only previous stint on Shaftesbury Avenue was to oversee the transfer of the harrowing Almeida adaptation of the Dogme incest film Festen in 2004, made him an unlikely choice to direct Cabaret.

"I saw this as a very rare opportunity to create an adult musical," he says. "It's serious subject matter, there's no happy ending and it has fantastic music. I love theatre where the narrative is strong, where you are not patronising the audience but asking them to engage emotionally and where there are also a few gags. The laughter that comes out of a black comedy is always more interesting to me. When you see a shaft of light in a dark room it shines brighter."

Whether there is an audience for a serious musical amid all the eyes 'n' teeth extravaganzas swamping the West End, he concedes, is another matter. "Simple maths dictate that all these shows can't reap the sort of profits their producers are hoping for," he shrugs. "But that's always been the way. It's a competitive industry."

Asked whether the preponderance of musicals is bad for the West End, he likens the commercial buzz around Shaftesbury Avenue to the sudden stability and creative fecundity that overtook the subsidised sector some three years ago. Yes, he says, it would be nice if there were fewer shows spun off the backs of TV shows and fewer star vehicles, more experimental work and new plays, "but the bottom line is that people are coming".

Anyway, he reiterates, for all that it has more cracking songs than Evita or Guys and Dolls, Cabaret is not a " normal" musical. Hence his decision to cast actors who can sing rather than singers who can act.

"Anna is a wonderful actress, there's no question, even with a bug," he says. "It was a bold piece of casting, and we had a lot of discussion about it, but in the end I'm glad we went that way.

With Sally it's not enough to just come on stage and say, 'Oh, I'm terribly divine.' She's a very complicated person, and that's phenomenally difficult to play."

He had no hesitation in casting his old Rada contemporary James Dreyfuss as the hoarsely reptilian Emcee: "Even at drama school he stood out, the relaxation and authority and confidence he had with an audience." And he needed Sheila Hancock and Geoffrey Hutchings to stop Cabaret's subplot about an elderly landlady and her Jewish lover becoming overly sentimental.

Norris insists he shares the credit for the show's success not only with his actors but with his designer Katrina Lindsay, with whom he has worked on 17 productions, and with Venezuelan choreographer Javier de Frutos, who gives the show its jagged, brutally sexual choreography.

All of them researched the history of the Weimar Republic and, in particular, the decadence of Berlin that drew and inspired Christopher Isherwood, whose writings in turn inspired Kander and Ebb. "It was very promiscuous: there were more male prostitutes per capita in Berlin in 1930 than in half the rest of the world put together," says Norris. "A lot of that came out of poverty. If you look at the paintings of Georg Grosz you can tell that these are not people having a good time: but if you are a young tourist or came from any kind of repressed background, then the liberality of it would have been very exciting."

The research shows unfussily in little details: the Emcee scoffing banknotes devalued by rampant inflation during the song, Money, or the jerkily ritualised movements of the dancers, which suggest they are by turns taking cocaine, being beaten up, and copulating. "Katrina and I knew we wanted something fresh and edgy," says Norris. "And one of the things Javier does best in his work is find the balance between pleasure and pain in a sexual context."

There's been some pain alongside the pleasure in Norris's career recently. Having won the 2004 Evening Standard Best Director award for Festen, his Almeida production of Blood Wedding was panned, then Festen flopped and lost around $2 million on Broadway, and the 1980s extravaganza Market Boy got mixed notices at the National.

He holds his hands up to his own errors: European actors would have made Festen more palatable to Americans, while Market Boy simply wasn't ready. But now he's got a bona fide West End hit under his belt. And he's taking a break. With good reason.

Norris met his wife Tanya Ronder at Rada and they married in 1995. An actor and writer, she translated Blood Wedding and is adapting DBC Pierre's satirical novel Vernon God Little, which Norris will direct at the Young Vic in April. She is also the mother of his sons Louis, nine, and Hector, four. After several years working on back-to-back productions and 20-hour days, Norris is looking forward to seeing more of all three of them.

"The other night, as we were having a glass of wine after leaving the theatre at midnight, my producer said to me and Katrina - who has a daughter - that he admired our work-life balance," says Norris. "We fell off our chairs laughing. There is no balance at all, or there hasn't been this year. You know, you go on turning up for work, telling your silly stories and meanwhile your kids grow up and you don't even realise it. So no, that's not been good, and it's starting to be readdressed. From now."

Cabaret is at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue (0870 890 1107).

The show must go on

1929 Christopher Isherwood moves to Weimar Berlin, writing journals he plans to turn into an epic novel called The Lost, but which eventually appear as Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the latter of which features a nightclub singer called Sally Bowles.

1966
Flushed with the success of their first musical, Flora - the Red Menace (starring the thenunknown Liza Minnelli) composer John Kander and writer/lyricist Fred Ebb collaborate with director Hal Prince and librettist Joe Masterhoff on an adaptation of Isherwood's books. Cabaret opens on Broadway on 20 November with Jill Haworth as Sally Bowles. Two years later, Judi Dench plays Sally in the London premiere.

1972
Bob Fosse releases his film version, with many new songs and a whole new subplot. Joel Grey reprises his original Broadway role as the Emcee, but Liza Minnelli is brought in to play a show-stopping, barnstorming Sally, in marked contrast to the original, fragile, second-rater. "We just hated it," John Kander said recently.

1993
First the Donmar Warehouse, then New York's Studio 54, is turned into the KitKat Club by director Sam Mendes. Alan Cumming's Emcee lords it over first Jane Horrocks, then Natasha Richardson, begins a mutual love affair with America, and is lost to British theatre for over a decade as a result.

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