Sam Mendes
Background
Sam Mendes was born in Berkshire, England. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he earned a degree in English. While at school, he was a member of the Marlowe Society, a theatre club at Cambridge University, through which he directed several plays including, Cyrano de Bergerac. At age twenty-four, Mendes made his West End debut by directing a production of The Cherry Orchard starring Judi Dench. Soon after he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company where he staged many productions including Hamlet, The Tempest, and Richard III. After college Mendes worked at the Chichester Festival Theatre as an Assistant Director for a number of productions including Major Barbara. He later went on to work for the Royal National Theatre as a director, overseeing productions of Othello and Edward Bond's The Sea. In 1990, Mendes became the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse. Mendes spent the first two years overseeing the theatre and then directed his first production for the company in 1992 with Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins.
Cabaret
In 1993, Mendes directed a revival of Cabaret at the Donmar Warehouse, hoping to expose the musical to a new generation of theatregoers. How would Mendes communicate Cabaret’s message to a new audience? Mendes’s answer was in a directorial discovery he made several years before. As he stated in an interview with Matt Wolf, “I think I realized in the theatre that it wasn’t enough to like a play or simply feel like you could make it work; you have to ultimately feel like you have a secret about the play. A secret that only you have and that, in the end, you make available to the audience” (qtd. Wolf 38). Mendes’s way of into the world of Cabaret was through the physical environment of the musical; he turned the stalls of the Donmar Warehouse into a real live Kit Kat Klub. Compared to the original 1966 Broadway production, Mendes’s interpretation explored the harsh realities of the kabaretts. Mendes oversaw an entire reinvention of the musical, including a complete reimagining of the material, as he added dialogue back into the libretto that had been discarded and by changing the medium of the musical, as he changed the entire Donmar Warehouse into a kabarret.
Mendes strove to give the audience the feeling like they were in a real kabarett. When the audience entered the theatre, the waitstaff served them drinks and food while covered in bruises and tattoos. The waiters would then walk onstage to double as the Kit Kat Klub band. In another intentional detail, Mendes did not distribute playbills until the end of the show in order to not break the feel of being in a real kabaratt. (Sawyers 148)
During the production’s rehearsal process, Mendes instructed the cast to read Fred Ebb’s lyrics without singing them and chorus members wrote their own character’s histories (Wolf 40). Mendes references the rehearsals for the show as “five weeks of a kind of crazy freedom” where he encouraged the actors to push their artistic boundaries (qtd. in Wolf 40). For example, the actor playing Ernst would also play the banjo with the orchestra and many members of the ensemble doubled as musicians for the Kit Kat Band. Mendes cast his then-girlfriend, Jane Horrocks, as Sally Bowles, and Alan Cumming as the Emcee. Mendes encouraged his actors to improvise throughout the show. The most notable improvisation start of the show’s run, when the Emcee picks a member of the audience as a dancing partner during the Entr’acte. Changes that Mendes made to Cabaret included combining the songs “Sitting Pretty” and “Money,”, playing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” on a phonograph, and Cliff clearly being bisexual by having him kiss Bobby, one of the Kit Kat Boys.
Mendes then continued his work in Cabaret by moving the production to Broadway in 1998. Mendes asked Cumming to bring his performance to Broadway. When asked to direct the show on Broadway, Mendes stipulated that his two requirements were a performance space with no more than 500 seats (because the Donmar had been less than 500 seats) and that Alan Cumming play the Emcee. Meeting both these requirements took time, which called for giving Cumming a green card and finding an unobstructed 500-seat space Finding such a space took the production team years (Gray). During this time Mendes went on to work on other projects and the production team hired Rob Marshall to direct and choreograph the production. Then Mendes became available to direct the show again. The two directors decided to work together. Neither Marshall nor Mendes had ever directed a musical on Broadway before, so they were creating the project together. Marshall stated that “The whole place became a cabaret, with a whole world and life happening simultaneously” (Marshall). In the 1998 Broadway revival, Mendes and Marshall sought to “go a step further, and let’s show ripped stockings. Let’s show the track marks on the arms, so we understand the drug use in the clubs. Let’s show an even seedier side. We were working to shock” (qtd. in Gray). Mendes received a Tony nomination for Cabaret but unfortunately lost to Julie Taymor who directed that season’s production of The Lion King. The success of the 1998 revival skyrocketed Mendes to fame. Following Cabaret, he would go on to win Academy Awards for American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, and Skyfall. Mendes also went on to win a Tony award for his direction in The Ferryman.
After the success of the 1998 Broadway Revival, there was talk of producing another revival in London. Mendes was offered the directing job, but rejected the offer, stating that “I absolutely said no to doing Cabaret again in the West End. At a certain point, it’s just a money-making enterprise, and I’m just not that interested” (qtd. in Wolf 41). Regardless he still insists that the Broadway revival had “outlived any of our expectations” (qtd. in Wolf 41).
Mendes directed Cabaret on Broadway once again in 2014, fifteen years after it the revival closed. Like his previous productions, he brought Cumming as the Emcee back with him. Like he did for the 1998 revival, Mendes staged this production in Studio 54. For this third Broadway revival, Mendes and Marshall again served as co-directors. The intent for this revival was the same for Mendes as it was in 1998, which was to expose a new generation to Cabaret.
Conclusion
Mendes works with the same artists repeatedly. Prior to Cabaret, Cumming played Hamlet for Mendes at the Donmar. Since then, the actor has continued to work with him for more than twenty years. Mendes has offered Cumming jobs in both directing and acting, like the 2014 Cabaret revivalAs a director, Mendes is willing to take risks in critically acclaimed pieces in order to make them relevant again. He actually wants to shock the audience. He seeks to create a world he can lure the audience into and then trap them inside where they grapple with the performance along with the actors. In regards to Cabaret, Mendes broke down the barriers between actor and audience as he forces them intertwine their realities into one.
Bibliography
Sawyers, June Skinner. Cabaret FAQ: All Thats Left to Know about the Broadway and Cinema Classic. Applause Theatre & Cinema, 2017.