The Eyes Have It: Explore Cabaret Designer Tom Scutt’s Transformation of the Kit Kat Club

For the production of Cabaret that opened in London in 2021, the scenic designer Tom Scutt converted the 1882 Playhouse Theatre—an old Victorian music hall with a gaudy, neo-Baroque interior—into an immersive, in-the-round, Weimar-era performance space called the Kit Kat Club. The venue boasted neo-Grecian statuary, a golden waterfall and specially commissioned charcoal sketches of dancers on the walls.

Broadway’s Kit Kat Club is not that Kit Kat Club. For the 2024 Broadway transfer of the show, Scutt oversaw a thorough, and thoroughly new transformation of the 1925 August Wilson Theatre. Scutt’s design riffs and builds on details from the original building, incorporates the work of American artists and references landmarks of New York queer culture, including Studio 54.

“All of the public spaces in this building are completely different from London,” Scutt, who also designed the show’s costumes, told Broadway.com Managing Editor Beth Stevens on The Broadway Show. 

Check out highlights from Scutt's darkly seductive designs for the Kit Kat Club below, then watch the video for a full tour of the enticing world of Cabaret.