By Neil Durham

WORTH A LOOK?: ***** RUNTIME: 170 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

WHEN?: Saturday 30 September 2023 (matinee), booking through 28 September 2024

You may know Rebecca Lucy Taylor as indie pop star Self Esteem, this is her West End debut and she is, as her character Sally Bowles might put it, deliciously divine.

• Read on for reasons including why Shears and Self Esteem make this electric production filthy gorgeous

But this is no stunt casting however and Taylor herself has written about her unprivileged background and stage school rejection.

On the platform formerly known as Twitter she posted: ’18 years since I left school desperate to get into drama school and become a musical theatre actress. I never got in obvs and an indie band, countless weird jobs, a solo career and an insane 2 years later I’m gonna be on the west end in the greatest production created by my favourite creatives in theatre. I keep crying about it all tbh.

‘Keep thinking about my Nan and grandad who would have finally seen me do a job that made sense to them. Keep thinking about how it cost a fortune to audition for drama schools and my dad would have to drive me down to London and how shite it felt to be told no over and over.

‘Thinking about how I got turned down at the first round of the Who Wants To Be A Maria telly show. How impossible it all felt. Thank you Cabaret team for putting me through my paces and giving me this opportunity. Oh and for the ppl online doubting if I can act – I’m going full House Of Gucci on this luv get a ticket from the 25th September onwards and see for yourself.’

Taylor wrote the music for Jodie Comer’s monsta-winning Prima Facie (Harold Pinter Theatre) and, like Comer, Self Esteem’s northern working class roots meant her showbusiness career would never be nourished by stage school education and instead only, ultimately, by on-the-job training.

Taylor plays Bowles, a British singer in Berlin nightclub The Kit Kat Club where much of the action beginning on New Year’s Eve in 1929, takes place.

Self Esteem’s Bowles is Julie Andrews played by Jennifer Saunders (Blithe Spirit, Harold Pinter Theatre). Her intonation is upper-class, straight out of Chelsea in London and, although she is not as physically funny as Sex Education‘s Aimee Lou Wood and her singing does not have the attack of Jessie Buckley, Taylor should be proud of giving a terrific performance.

We’ve now seen this production of Cabaret 7 times, including on its 1st preview in November 2021, and we can see why former Scissor Sisters frontman Shears would be so drawn to the role of the EmCee.

We saw him play at the Village Underground this summer at a gig longlisted as our concert of the year and he too is making his West End debut although he has played in musical Kinky Boots on Broadway.

The EmCee is essentially the role he was playing as frontman of his band and his casting makes perfect sense. He may not have the style of Eddie Redmayne, the theatrical experience of Fra Fee or youth of Callum Scott Howells but his stagecraft is honed by years of gigs both intimate and arena-sized and he brings new insight into numbers we’d not especially noticed before particularly I Don’t Care Much where he works really well with Taylor.

Shears gives us a cheeky bottom flash during Two Ladies and his EmCee is so effortless and on-point that we can’t wait to see him stretch himself further in the West End as we wait for the musical he has co-written with Elton John, the magnificent Tammy Faye (Almeida), to appear there.

Cabaret may have been usurped in our affections as London’s best revival by Guys and Dolls at the Bridge Theatre and the sadly now closed  La Cage Aux Folles at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, but this casting of 2 of our favourite pop stars has captured our attention and their performances are well worthy of yours. They appear together from 25 September through 20 January 2024 (Update: now extended through 9 March 2024) and Cabaret remains the classiest and most political of those brilliant revivals still running.

The casting of Shears and Self Esteem will hopefully bring a whole new audience to an electric production of a classic that deserves to be seen as we have done, time and time again. In the words of 1 of the Scissor Sisters’ best-loved songs, it remains both filthy and gorgeous.

• Main picture via Facebook courtesy ATG Tickets
• Have you seen Cabaret before and what did you think?
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