Cabaret

Jane was together with Alan Cumming in this musical in what has become known as the Donmar Warehouse production. It was directed by Sam Mendes.

I've been told it's quite different from the film, which had a mainly americanised version of Sally Bowles, but which I haven't seen. Jane's Sally is a comical, but also rather sad, English creature, prone to mood swings and difficult to keep in check. This is also present in the voice she uses: it's loudish and haughty, like she's dictating something, monotonic during a sentence, but it can suddenly change to a completely different tone between sentences. This Sally Bowles is someone who your better judgement immediately knows is not someone you should hang out with, but who you will fall for and pity anyway. Like I think the character is best.

To quote Jane from an interview: "Because of Minnelli, everyone assumes that Sally Bowles was a great singer, but the whole point was that she wasn't - she was an upper-class English girl who bummed around Berlin. She was just a great performer." [...] "The character's very like me - not trained - she just does it from an emotional thing."

The setting in the Donmar Warehouse was rather special: the front rows of the audience were seated around the stage, so they became part of the set of the Kit Kat Club. This gave a very intimate feel, which also shows on television. I actually prefer television recordings in these cases: firstly you can see them again, but you also have the close-ups so you see the acting better, which I most definitely would not have been able to see sitting on the last row as I undoubtedly would have been...

My only problem with this musical is that the story ends rather abruptly. It builds up to a good description of life in nazi-Germany, it has all these premonitions of the dangers that are to come, but when these premonitions are coming true, it stops. But this is probably more a problem with the story and my understanding of it than with this particular production.

Photographs

Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles.

Scan of a photocopy of a photograph belonging to an interview.

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