The musical Cabaret has attracted its share of stunt casting over the years, its vignetted book and club-set numbers allowing performers of all kinds to step into its Weimar-era shoes—and allowing audiences to side-eye whoever might don them next.
But if anyone squinted at the news that the country singer Orville Peck would be making his Broadway debut as the Emcee in this latest Broadway revival, they need only have looked beyond his signature masks: Peck, who has cultivated an air of mystery around his background, started as a trained dancer and musical theater actor. He even has history with Germany, having done voiceover work there as a child. So, that he makes an absurdly successful Emcee—with an intuitive command of the line between desire and menace that rivals, if we’re honest, that of Joel Grey and Alan Cumming—should not come as such a wonderful surprise as it does.
His character, the master of ceremonies at a debauched Berlin club in 1939, also invites enigma, but Peck told Vogue that there was never a question for him as to whether he should keep his mask on. He thought it would feel like inserting himself into the show, rather than coming in to tell a story honestly. Still, a few days before his first performance, he joked he didn’t know how he would react when the spotlight first hit his unmasked face: “I’m very curious to see if I’m going to roll with it and find it exhilarating, or if I am going to have an out-of-body experience or a mental breakdown.”
On April 7, a week into his run opposite a fierce Eva Noblezada as our latest Sally Bowles, the production held a glitzy gala performance with a number of their friends. Roaming around the theater, transformed to resemble the show’s Kit Kat Club, were theater favorites like Andrew Rannells, Conrad Ricamora, Jeremy Jordan, and Gideon Glick—but also friends from Peck’s tight-knit world of queer-flavored, online-era media: Chappell Roan and Larry Owens, Liz Gillies and Busy Phillips, and a host of Drag Race alumni, including Trixie Mattel, Jinkx Monsoon, Katya Zamolodcikova, Kandy Muse, and Meatball. Oh, and Norman Reedus, an unlikely friend made during a music video shoot, was there with his wife, Diane Kruger.
