Tony Nominee Steven Skybell Takes His Freshly Mended Heart on a Walk to Cabaret's Kit Kat Club

Just two months before starting rehearsals for Cabaret—the Broadway transfer of Rebecca Frecknall's Olivier Award-winning production—Steven Skybell underwent open heart surgery. He downplays the event during his walk-and-talk with Broadway Show correspondent Charlie Cooper. "It wasn't an emergency," he tells her. "Thankfully, I found the perfect time. I had a show close, I had the surgery the next day, and then I had eight weeks before first rehearsal." 

The idea of a "perfect time" for heart surgery is usually relative—except when it's the time that allows you to play the sweet, optimistic fruit vendor Herr Schultz in Kander and Ebb's Cabaret. Skybell's Broadway career extends back to a 1988 revival of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, but he's likely best known to today's theatergoing audiences as Tevye from the Yiddish language production of Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye of course tops the list of great Jewish roles in musical theater, but Herr Schultz isn't far behind, embodying a small slice of the devastation that came with the rise of Nazism in Weimar-era Germany.

"I'm Jewish and it just is very meaningful to me to be able to tell this story," he says, reflecting on the role that also earned him his first career Tony nomination. "[It] takes place in 1930, but it's really a story for our time as well."

Watch the full interview below.