John Kander peers over the top of his glasses and smiles broadly. “What are you most scared about? Was there any moment when your heart sank?” he asks, kindly. Rebecca Frecknall grins back. “We’re most scared about 600 people coming to see it,” she says. “There are just so many unknowns.” The pair are thousands of miles apart – one in upstate New York, the other in London - and they are talking via Zoom. But the tie that binds them overcomes distance and space. Composer Kander, with his late, long-time professional partner, the lyricist Fred Ebb, created Cabaret, the show that invented the concept musical. Frecknall is currently directing a starry new production (previews have just started) with Eddie Redmayne as the mysterious and sinister Emcee, Jessie Buckley as lost show girl Sally Bowles and Omari Douglas, so brilliant on TV this year in Russell T Davies’s It’s a Sin, as the bisexual writer Cliff Bradshaw. It was Redmayne’s star power and persistence that helped assemble the team that has now rebuilt and reshaped the Playhouse theatre in London’s West End into a version of the Kit Kat club, the setting in Weimar Berlin for Cabaret’s dark story of dreams and desire in the shadow of the Nazis’ rise to power. But it is Frecknall, who won such acclaim for her radical production of Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, who is now driving the piece on to the stage. She is, astonishingly, the first woman to direct a major production of Cabaret. On Zoom, she looks tired – it’s the day before the dress rehearsal – but her enthusiasm for the show and the staging is infectious. “There is something about a proscenium arch that is tricky because you can feel that you are looking through a view-finder. What’s interesting about working in this space in the round is that it is so immediate. The audience is very present with the actors and you are able to pull out more contemporary threads. There are so many colours in the work and people will interpret it in different ways. You’re not looking into a picture of a room from another time.” She pauses and laughs, as she considers the fact that she’s discussing her ideas for staging Cabaret in front of one of the people who created it. But Kander, now 94 and – talking from his home in Accord, New York, where he lives with his husband, Albert Stephenson – doing an impression of a sprightly 75-year-old, is leaning forward, nodding. “Whether or not to put the whole show in the Kit Kat club was something that was discussed when we wrote it,” he says (the original Cabaret has two areas of stage space, one for “real life”, one for the club). The truth is that when Cabaret premiered on Broadway in 1966, it was already bold enough. The idea of adapting Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin into a musical had been floating around for some time, when Joe Masteroff – as book writer – and Kander and Ebb came on board. It was Hal Prince, the original director, who came up with the breakthrough idea that the songs of the Emcee, played directly to the audience, would be a metaphor for the soul of Germany as the Nazis rose to power. “I have to say at the outset that Cabaret is Hal Prince,” Kander confirms. “All of us contributed our best work to it and it was a very healthy and close collaboration, but this piece was Hal. And I would say hats off to him, because he changed the face of musical theatre. He’s the one who did it. “I don’t walk to talk about him as a revolutionary, as it’s not how he would have thought of himself. But when I look back, his approach to theatre was physically and formally revolutionary. I remember to our surprise, when Cabaret opened, people talked about it as if they had never seen something like it before and we probably didn’t have the vaguest idea of what that meant, because when you work on something minute to minute, it doesn’t seem startling. We were just working on something we really liked.” Which isn’t to say that everything about the creation of Cabaret was sweetness and light. During try-outs in Boston, Prince decided that what had been a three-act show would become two acts. “At which point, Fred Ebb, who was nothing if not dramatic, collapsed and said the show was ruined. It would never work now,” Kander remembers. “In our hotel room, Fred was lying on the bed and Joel Grey [who played the Emcee] was lying on one side of him and I was on the other, holding his hands, saying it’s not over, it’s going to be fine.” He laughs again. To him, these stories are well worn and he keeps apologising for telling them. But the vividness of his memories is a tribute both to his own vitality and the ongoing power of the show. Although Kander and Ebb went on to write Chicago, Kiss of the Spider Woman and the song New York, New York, it is Cabaret that confirms their place among the immortals of musical theatre. “We all stand on the shoulders of people like John who have done it first and influenced people,” says Frecknall. “Cabaret is one of those works that change things and maybe there are pieces that have been written since that wouldn’t have been written without it.” Though they didn’t think they were writing anything revolutionary at the time, they knew that they were producing what Prince called “a parable of contemporary morality”, one that he saw as drawing parallels between the spiritual bankruptcy of Berlin in the 1920s and America in the 1960s. This ability to be continuously relevant, as much as its fabulous songs, keeps the show’s flame alive. “All of us were of an age where we had been part of the second world war and the whole Nazi story and what makes people behave in the way they do,” Kander says. “What all of us were a little naive about was that it was neither brand new, nor was it going to end. Every time there is a major production of Cabaret, there’s this horrible feeling of: why is it so pertinent now?” “It’s such a masterpiece,” adds Frecknall. “So sharp in the way you can take it incredibly specifically or see its ripples and refractions across every decade. Our production is not doing a historical recreation as far as design and aesthetic go, neither are we doing something that is set now. I’m always very interested in the space between – acknowledging that this is a piece about a specific time, which is being performed at a specific time. The conversation between those two spaces is important to me.” The production has deliberately cast an extremely diverse company of actors, “all of whom connect with some aspect of the politics of the piece. Because we have that complexity in the actors it’s really interesting to see how it’s connecting to people. Being able to have conversations about the piece with the Jewish members of the company, with the queer members of the company [resonates].”” For Frecknall, the key song in Cabaret is the desolate What Would You Do?, sung by Fräulein Schneider who rejects her Jewish lover in the interests of self-preservation. “There is a desperation and a necessity to survive, which for me is part of human nature.” In the original production, Fräulein Schneider was played by Lotte Lenya, the celebrated singer married to Kurt Weill, who had herself fled Nazi Germany. “She was our conscience, she really was,” says Kander. “We were kind of nervous about giving this song to a woman who got out of Berlin 24 hours before they would have killed her and had been through everything she had.” She reassured them. “Her phrase was ‘an entire population could not emigrate’. She wasn’t excusing Fräulein Schneider, she was explaining her.” Kander says he realised something long after he had written the piece. “In a way, all the principal characters are living in their own delusion; they all believe that something can happen which can’t. Sally believes she can become a great glamorous star when the fact is she’s a fairly untalented middle-class girl. Cliff believes he can be straight, that he can have a child. Schneider believes she can have a romantic life with a Jewish grocer. They are all living in their wishes. Maybe we all do that; maybe one of the things about the piece that continues to matter is that it reflects that.” Frecknall wholeheartedly agrees. “I think for me the wider political moment that the characters are living in exposes this element of human nature, which is that it is easier to live in delusion than in reality, so much easier that sometimes we don’t realise we are doing it. Cliff’s last lines are ‘I was dancing with Sally Bowles and we were both fast asleep’ and I think that’s super-contemporary.” Despite the fact that Cabaret became a major hit on Broadway, and is now constantly revived, its first steps in Britain were very uncertain. The initial production in the UK only lasted for 336 performances. “It was a flop,” says Kander gleefully. “It got terrible reviews. Judi Dench, who was probably the greatest Sally Bowles I’ve seen in my life, got bad reviews. I remember seeing a headline asking ‘What have they done to our Judi?’” He loved working with Dench. “She hadn’t sung a lot and we were working on the song of Cabaret together and at the end of it she has a big, long note to hold and she was having trouble with it. I was showing her ways to cheat and she stopped and turned to me and said, ‘What do you want? What do you really want?’ I said, ‘I’d like it the way I wrote it’ and she said – and I really want to put this up over my desk – ‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get’. I think about that fondly, whenever I work with another actress, just how game she was. She was quite wonderful.” Kander was also excited by the Sam Mendes production of Cabaret, starring Alan Cumming as the Emcee, which began at the Donmar in 1993 and was later amplified for its run on Broadway five years later. “It made me realise there are so many ways to do a piece. If the piece has any validity, it’s open to all kinds of not just reinterpretation but reimagining. When I see a production of Cabaret that’s a brand-new take on it and it works, it makes me really happy.” Oddly enough, in this context, seeing Bob Fosse’s 1972 movie version of the show, starring Liza Minnelli, who had been Kander and Ebb’s first choice to play Sally on stage, did not make him happy. “It’s hard to talk about, because we were pretty close to a lot of people involved with it,” he says, tentative for the first time. “They screened it to us, just Freddie and me in a room. I remember at the end of it, we looked at each other and we sort of shook our heads because it wasn’t Cabaret and it took a while to shake that expectation out of our heads. Then, when we went to see it in the cinema with an audience, we realised it wasn’t Cabaret, but it was an extraordinary film. Because of what our original intentions were, I still prefer the stage piece.” In approaching the piece afresh and as the first woman to direct it, one area that Frecknall feels will be altered is what constitutes sexiness. “I don’t want to go down that Fosse-esque route,” she told me. “It has become a nostalgic, aesthetic terminology. I want to unlock the piece. It was done before Fosse got his hands on it and the world of the piece existed before there was a musical, so there is so much to draw on.” Of the original Cabaret team, Ebb died first, in 2004, though you wouldn’t know it was so long ago from the warmth with which Kander talks about him. But Kander continues to work on new shows, with different collaborators. “I am in the middle of a production that we will have a five-week workshop starting in January,” he says enthusiastically. “We had a reading all on Zoom and it blew my mind.” But it’s clear, too, how excited he is about the prospect of Frecknall’s work on Cabaret. As he says goodbye, he makes a little speech. “I love that this is happening and hope everything goes swimmingly,” he says. “I can only tell you that at the first performance of Cabaret in New York, the set was divided into two motorised halves. And only one half came on.” He smiles. “I’m sending that thought to you as a gesture of good luck.”