EXCLUSIVE: Life is actually a Cabaret for Aimee Lou Wood, star of Netflix comedy Sex Education and awards season film Living, who’s rehearsing to make her West End musical debut as Sally Bowles within the radical revival of the basic present by John Kander and Fred Ebb.
Wood joins John McCrea, who was the unique Jamie in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie at The Sheffield Crucible and in London, and is taking over the function of the Emcee.
They start their performances in director Rebecca Frecknall’s manufacturing of Cabaret on the Kit Kat Club, Charing Cross from February 13.
Wood says that she suffered from stage fright when she was a child — “shyness and fear” stopped her from performing. “I couldn’t get up and sing in front of anyone,” she remembers. That was till she hit 16 and picked Maybe This Time, a quantity from Cabaret, to carry out throughout an audition for a task as Adelaide in Guys and Dolls.
“I just remember my drama teacher being like, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ I got the role, played Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and everyone was like, ‘wow,’” she provides.
”The indisputable fact that Maybe This Time was my first ever audition, and now I’m going to sing it within the West End is sort of mad,” she says, smiling broadly.
The 28-year-old provides that Margaret, the function she performs in Living reverse Bill Nighy, impressed her to go for the function of Sally Bowles in Caberet. “When I got this thing through, so many people were like saying that in terms of career progression, it isn’t a great choice because you want to keep yourself free for a big movie or something. But I’ve got an amazing agent, and she was like, ‘Aimee, this is your dream part. You’ve said you wanted to play Sally Bowles since you were 11. Do it. Do it. It’s for you.’”
“I want to play Sally Bowles and I want to stretched by it, stretched out in my comfort zone. I want to feel like a different person when I finish this job because that’s what I want to do with my life. I don’t want to be thinking constantly about the next right step on the ladder, because there is no bloody ladder. It’s all imagined anyway,” she says chuckling.
She and McCrae are actually rehearsing with Cabaret’s affiliate director Jordan Fein. Although McCrae notes that due to the character of the present’s staging, the Emcee engages extra with the viewers “and I can’t rehearse with them,” says Wood.
Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne performed the leads within the revival, which began in 2021. Producer Adam Speers of co-producer ATG Productions says his crew knew of Wood’s love of Caberet a while again and had saved in contact earlier than she was forged.
He says that the brand new forged, together with Nathan Ives-Moiba taking part in Clifford, will play the roles till May 27 when the elements will probably be recast once more.
The present’s an ATG/Underbelly manufacturing. Designer Tom Scutt redesigned the inside of what’s usually the Playhouse Theatre, reworking it into the Kit Kat Club, a infamous dive in Weimar Berlin.
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