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'Cabaret' to end Broadway run with Black leads Billy Porter, Marisha Wallace

Karu F. Daniels, New York Daily News on

Published in Entertainment News

NEW YORK — Broadway’s latest revival of “Cabaret” is going out with a bang before it bids auf wiedersehen.

Producers of “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” announced the production will end on Oct. 19 after a 14-month run at the August Wilson Theatre. But before the show closes, Billy Porter and Marisha Wallace will take over the leading roles of Emcee and Sally Bowles — fresh off performing in the West End production earlier this year.

Porter and Wallace are set to take over for Orville Peck and Eva Noblezada on July 22. The latest casting represents the first time two Black actors have starred as the leads in “Cabaret.”

“I can think of no better way to celebrate this production’s incredible run on Broadway than by welcoming Billy and Marisha into the company for our final 13 weeks,” director Rebecca Frecknall said in the announcement. “They brought down the house every night on the West End, and I cannot wait for Broadway audiences to experience the electricity they generate together.”

The role of Emcee marks a return to Broadway for Porter. The Emmy, Grammy and two-time Tony Award winner last appeared on the Great White Way in 2016’s star-studded “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed.”

 

In 2022, he was among the 40-plus producers — including RuPaul, Jennifer Hudson and Alan Cumming — of best musical winner “A Strange Loop.”

Wallace is also making a Broadway comeback after first earning her stripes in the original companies of “Aladdin” and “Something Rotten!” The American-born British actress has since wowed the London theater scene with a run as Effie in the Olivier Award-winning production of “Dreamgirls.” She has also had star turns in “Waitress,” “Hairspray” and “Oklahoma!”

“Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club” is based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories about a bisexual American author who falls for an alcoholic nightclub performer during the Nazi takeover of Germany.

For the latest incarnation of the Kander & Ebb musical, the theater has been transformed into an immersive burlesque club set in 1930s Berlin, replete with all the debauchery one can imagine.


©2025 New York Daily News. Visit nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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