Spring Preview: Gayle Rankin Is Ready to Play Cabaret’s Sally Bowles, the ‘Female Hamlet of Musical Theater’

In 2014, the Glasgow-born, Juilliard-trained actress Gayle Rankin made her Broadway debut in Cabaret, playing Fräulein Kost, the accordion-playing prostitute. (She told Broadway.com at the time that she watched the girls going in and out of Scores strip club for research.)

Among her numerous screen roles since then, she’s played a female wrestler in touch with her inner wolf in Netflix’s Glow, a punk rock drummer in Her Smell and a traumatized motel owner in Bad Things, and will soon be seen in the second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon. On stage, she was an unforgettable, heart-wrenching Ophelia opposite Oscar Isaac’s Hamlet at the Public Theater—making a terrible mess of the theater’s potted plants in a key scene.

Now she’s making her return to Broadway in a new production of Cabaret, a transfer of the acclaimed West End production directed by Rebecca Frecknall. This time, Rankin is playing the haunted Weimar-era nightclub chanteuse Sally Bowles opposite Eddie Redmayne’s Emcee.

“Not to get too poetic, but I feel like I've been preparing to play Sally for a decade,” she said during Broadway.com's Spring Preview photo shoot at Auction House. “I think some part of her has kind of lived inside of me … I've really, really been engaging with this material, which has been, for over a decade now, a great part of my life.”

The character of Sally Bowles first materialized—dressed in black silk, with emerald-green fingernails, cigarette-stained hands, a powdered face and cherry lips—in the pages of Berlin Stories by Charles Isherwood in 1937. I Am a Camera, the theatrical adaptation of Isherwood’s stories, followed in 1951—Julie Harris won a Tony Award for her portrayal—followed by a film of the same name in 1955.

It was the 1966 Broadway musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, with a book by Joe Masteroff, that ensured the character's immortality, however. Since then, the character has been played by such devastating performers as Judi Dench, Liza Minnelli (in the 1972 film, for which she won an Academy Award), Natasha Richardson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brooke Shields, Molly Ringwald, Jane Horrocks, Michelle Williams and Emma Stone. Jessie Buckley, with whom Rankin appeared in the movie Men, played Sally in Frecknall’s Cabaret in the West End to Olivier Award-winning acclaim. Cara Delevingne steps into the role in London next.

Isherwood himself described Sally as “a bohemian Joan of Arc”: vulnerable yet vivacious, kooky and cute yet a desperately tragic figure. Rankin has her own contradictory words for the character: tender and ambitious, frightened and frightening. “There’s deep, deep mystery there,” she said. “I mean, the tagline has become ‘the female Hamlet of musical theater,’ which… I'll be going to throw up now. I'm completely honored and I’m totally overwhelmed in the best way. I love a big meal and this is one of the biggest meals that you can get.”

Ten years after playing a supporting role in Cabaret, Rankin feels “more alive than I’ve ever felt” at having graduated to leading lady status. “To be seen in that light is humbling and moving and lights fire under my ass.” She added, “I think it's going to be a really important journey: me getting to know myself as a performer and as an artist. It's such a huge undertaking—and a gift.”

The Broadway Show Credits: Directed by Zack R. Smith | Producers: Paul Wontorek and Beth Stevens | Senior Producers: Caitlin Moynihan and Lindsey Sullivan | Videographers: Born in Brooklyn, Luis Ferrá and Nick Shakra

Photo Credits: Photography by Emilio Madrid  | Location: Auction House NYC