How a Broadway Theater Was Remade Into a Queer Cabaret

By Dan Piepenbring Photographs and Video by David Chow April 23, 2024

The set and costume designer Tom Scutt has conjured a surreal, New York-inspired version of the fictional Kit Kat Club for the latest revival of the 1966 musical "Cabaret."

For “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club,” which opened on Broadway last weekend, Scutt expanded the production from its more modest footprint in London’s West End last year, embracing the vast interiors of New York’s August Wilson Theater.

Despite the auditorium’s much larger capacity (it’s twice as big), Scutt hoped to preserve the production’s intimacy. “I was insistent that we didn’t change the size of the stage itself,” he says.

The show’s wigs “bring me a lot of joy,” says Scutt, who also designed the production’s costumes, referencing influences from klezmer to voguing.

Scutt set up the theater so the audience enters through a neon-lit alleyway rather than through the main entrance. “For me, design is about how the story is meeting the public,” he says. “I want to open up new possibilities of theater-going.” Coming out of the pandemic, he felt the need to celebrate “the joy of being together — a group of people experiencing something alive.”

Scutt painted on top of the existing shapes and patterns on the Wilson’s walls, blurring the line between old and new. “It was about latching onto those symbols,” he says, “blowing them up so it felt bespoke.”

A gilded eye — conveying danger, voyeurism and the idea of bearing witness — is a central image in the production design. Scutt layered it over a pre-existing painted archway.

The arch also features images of a blue comb and hat, a golden key and a scarlet drop of blood — symbols derived from a plaque on the theater’s cornerstone, dating to 1925, which says, “Within these walls the human mind shall once again celebrate with gaiety, with pity and with truth the divine pageant of the human soul.” As Scutt thinks of it, “That’s ‘Cabaret,’ full stop.”

Scutt commissioned pieces from Jeremy Anderson, a New York-based ceramist and lighting designer, with what he calls a “slightly hallucinogenic pattern” reminiscent of the Chilean French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work.

The theater’s vault, where the show unfolds, is “the heart of the thing that has been enticing you,” Scutt says — the place where the many eye icons seem to converge. Its centerpiece is a sculpted eye bedecked in lights with a disco ball iris.

The disco ball is intended to evoke memories of New York’s 1970s, queer-leaning club culture, particularly Studio 54.

For any show, Scutt — who’s been designing for nearly two decades — grounds himself in the space by documenting it with a Polaroid or disposable camera. “It reminds me that it’s all real, not just this mad dream,” he says.

“There’s certainly a David Lynch thing going on,” says Scutt of the theater’s so-called Red Bar, one of three new lounges he planned and designed throughout the building for preshow mingling. “I’m interested in these large cinematic landscapes.”

The heart of the Red Bar feels something like a confessional, with grilles that guests can speak through. The designer made it feel porous — a way of shrouding everyone in mystery, including the staff selling drinks.

In the Green Bar, guests can tack signed Polaroids of themselves to a pinboard. “People create their own cabaret,” Scutt says.

“I wanted it to feel like an old New York gay bar, a real institution, with a beauty and a campiness,” Scutt says of the Green Bar. “It doesn’t need to feel like 1920s Germany; it just needs to feel like you’re elsewhere.”

Scutt installed a triptych of murals by the Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase in the August Wilson. “Watching those paintings come in was the most moved I’ve been in the process,” Scutt says.

When designing the lampshades for some stageside tables, the designer drew inspiration from the image of a pyramid with a floating eye that appears on the backside of American dollar bills.

By presenting “Cabaret” in the round, Scutt hoped to conjure what he calls “a slightly ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ feel” in the space, referencing Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film. “Almost like a Masonic temple,” he says, a place of magic and ritual.

On the underside of the auditorium’s chandeliers, layered asterisks and stars emphasize the production’s Art Deco inspirations.

“The piece continually changes with the performance,” says Scutt, who put the actor Eddie Redmayne in burgundy leather as the Emcee. “There will always be discoveries about how people flow and elements of the set that need to help change that.”