When Rebecca Frecknall was a child, one of her favorite things to watch was a televised 1993 London revival of “Cabaret,” which her father had recorded on VHS tape. As the British theater director grew up, she hoped that one day she would stage a version of the musical, in which a writer falls in love with an exuberant and wayward cabaret performer in Weimar-era Germany.
In early March, in a Midtown rehearsal room, Frecknall, 38, was preparing to do just that. Her “Cabaret,” which opens in previews at the August Wilson Theater on April 1, is a transfer from London’s West End, where it opened in 2021 to critical acclaim. The show won seven Olivier Awards, the British equivalent to the Tonys.
“I always wanted to direct ‘Cabaret’,” Frecknall said later in an interview. “I just never thought I’d get the rights to it.” Her opportunity came when Eddie Redmayne — a producer on the show who played the Emcee in London, and will reprise the part on Broadway — asked her in 2019 to be part of a bid for a revival.
At first it seemed like “a pipe dream,” Redmayne said, but after years of wrangling, they pulled it off. For the London show, the Playhouse Theater was reconfigured to reflect the musical’s debauched setting, transforming it into the Kit Kat Club, with cabaret tables and scantily clad dancers and musicians roaming the foyer and auditorium. The August Wilson Theater is getting a similar treatment, Frecknall said. To honor the playhouse’s namesake, the production designer Tom Scutt commissioned Black artists to paint murals in the reconfigured lobby, with theatergoers now entering via an alleyway off 52nd Street.
Shortly before the show opened in London, Frecknall’s father died. That recorded revival, directed by Sam Mendes, was one of his favorites, and Frecknall loved it so much that, as she grew up and studied theater, she chose never to see the show onstage.
That has perhaps helped her find her own way with the show. In London, where Frecknall has been mounting notable productions since 2018, she has earned a reputation for refreshing the classics: “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “Three Sisters” and “Romeo and Juliet.” But she is not afraid to disregard Chekhov’s stage directions or cut key scenes from Shakespeare. For her recent show “Julie” at the International Theater Amsterdam, she adapted Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” herself, changing the setting from a manor house to a modern, stainless-steel kitchen. Instead of a gown, her Julie wore a gold sequined cocktail dress.
Ivo van Hove, the Tony-award winning director who commissioned “Julie” for his Amsterdam playhouse, said he admired Frecknall for her “daring to transpose those sacred texts to the present,” adding that she taught her actors to “speak the language of the body, not just the language of words.”
Dance sequences are a hallmark of her shows, often devised by Frecknall herself. “I sort of say it flippantly that I’d like to be a choreographer,” she said. “There’s something for me about bodies and movement that feels so good.”
In her “Romeo and Juliet,” the knife fights between Montagues and Capulets became energetic, ballet-like episodes. For “Streetcar,” at the same theater, her ensemble moved as if guided by the crashing cymbals of a live drummer. Her influences were rooted more in dance than drama, she said: “I would be Pina Bausch if I could.”
Frecknall’s interest in movement started with childhood dance classes that she took while growing up in Warboys, a small village near Cambridge, England. There, she said, “everybody knew each other,” and “no one went to the theater.” Except of course, for the theater-mad Frecknalls.
Her father, Paul Frecknall, had been obsessed with the stage since he was a boy, but a theater career was out of the question for the working-class lad, Frecknall said. It “wasn’t really something to pursue — you got a job that paid something,” she added. Instead, he channeled his passion into amateur dramatics, and met his wife, Jane, in an community theater group.
Frecknall’s parents nurtured her interest in the arts. She took flute and dance lessons and listened to cast albums from her father’s CD collection. Occasionally, she went with her father to London to see shows on the West End. (The first time she saw “Cats,” she said, she was 8 years old and so scared she cried.)
Paul Frecknall’s love of theater also took him to New York, to see shows on Broadway. When Frecknall was 15, she discovered a Playbill he had brought back from the original Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus.” Her curiosity was piqued, and her father gave her the script.
“It changed my life,” Frecknall said. Having only seen musicals, she hadn’t considered that theater could be a vehicle for moral or political questions. “There were ideas in that play that were so much bigger,” she added. “I didn’t know theater could do that.”
After graduating high school, Frecknall enrolled to study drama at Goldsmiths College in London. One of her teachers there, Cass Fleming recalled that she was “curious and sort of brave,” and that, even then, she was making work “that sat between directing and choreographing.” After postgraduate study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, she worked as an assistant director at esteemed London institutions, including the Young Vic and the National Theatre.
It was while working on a 2012 staging of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” that Frecknall met Rupert Goold, the Tony-nominated director who now runs the Almeida, an off-West End venue known for its cutting-edge approach. “Directing tends to breed a certain level of overconfidence,” Goold said, but with Frecknall, it “just didn’t feel like that. She seemed quiet, kind of good-natured, and a bit anxious.” He added that he would “be lying if I said I knew from that first week that we had a major director on our hands.”
In 2016, after assisting directors for nearly seven years, Frecknall had her directorial debut: a more traditional take on “Miss Julie” at a regional theater. Two years later, she joined the Almeida’s resident director program. That year, Goold commissioned her production of Williams’s rarely staged “Summer and Smoke,” in which actors performed in a pit of dirt surrounded by pianos that the ensemble sporadically played. It won Frecknall her first Olivier.
The actor Patsy Ferran, who played the lead in “Summer and Smoke” and has worked with Frecknall on two other shows, said rehearsing with the director was liberating. “You can think you’ve found your limit,” Ferran said, but Frecknall always pushed performers beyond it, drawing better performances out of them.
Rehearsals usually began with warm-up games, she said, and though Frecknall is serious about her work, “the process isn’t.” Both Ferran and Paul Mescal, who played Stanley Kowalski in Frecknall’s “Streetcar,” compared the director’s rehearsal rooms to “playgrounds.”
Rehearsals were the part of a production Frecknall said she enjoyed the most. “I don’t like having a show on,” she added. “I do always have a slight, low level of anxiety around it,” she said.
Mescal, who won an Olivier for his “Streetcar” performance, said, “Rebecca struggles to enjoy the finished product because she’s always searching for something greater.” But that was also “why her work is so brilliant and so commanding,” he added. “Because she never settles.”
“Cabaret” chronicles the insular nightclub life of its characters while Nazism thrives around them, suggesting that their apathy helped spread it. During rehearsals this month, Frecknall invited Joshua Stanton, a rabbi, and Betsy L. Billard, a queer Jewish woman, into the studio for a workshop, giving the cast a chance to contemplate the musical’s historical message.
As part of that process, Redmayne said, “Every single person in that cast had a conversation about our own heritage.” Frecknall “knows her responsibility to the story,” he added, which is to help the cast “bring their own stories to the piece.”
Before the “Cabaret” transfer was announced, Frecknall had signed on to direct another musical on Broadway: an adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” with music by Florence Welch, of Florence and the Machine. Frecknall didn’t have time for both, she said, though it was “probably the best thing” for “Gatsby,” a show based on such an important American text, that it would now be directed by an American, Rachel Chavkin.
Frecknall said she was at a point in her career where she could afford to be selective, and now turns down work that doesn’t feel right. “I never feel like I’m going to work to fund my life. My work is my life,” she said. “I’m really low maintenance,” she added. “I’m single and don’t have dependents. I just have to feed my cat.”
Once “Cabaret” opens here, she plans to return to London and take a break for the summer, she said: By then, she will have spent six months working on three productions back-to-back. But she was already looking forward, and said that she would love to make a film one day or direct another stage production from her dad’s VHS collection: Steven Sondheim’s “Company.”
Getting a musical off the ground is expensive and difficult, she said — like a “big fish in a stream” that “very few people catch” — and she knew “Cabaret” might be her one chance.
But van Hove wasn’t quite so worried. “She is one of those directors who will stay with us for a long time,” he said.
