The New Yorker recently featured Michelle Williams’ work on CABARET, accompanied by ANGELINA AVALLONE’s fabulous work as make-up designer for the production.
For more on CABARET, Michelle Williams, and Angelina’s make-up design, view the full article HERE, exerpt below:
STARS
Michelle Williams and Neil Patrick Harris play performers on Broadway.
When it comes to technique, actors know what you might call one another’s family secrets. They know what goes into creating a sustained stage illusion, and how to make a scene partner give and then give some more. They know why a script works and when it doesn’t. Even so, the best actors understand that it’s the accidents, the sudden improvisations and flights of fancy, that can make a performance real, or transcendent—a happening that cannot be fully explained. As the storied Geraldine Page said, in Lillian and Helen Ross’s essential 1962 book, “The Player,” “When the character uses you, that’s when you’re really cooking. You know you’re in complete control, yet you get the feeling that you didn’t do it. . . . You don’t completely understand it, and you don’t have to.” Michelle Williams and Neil Patrick Harris, who are starring in “Cabaret” (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at Studio 54) and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (at the Belasco), respectively, draw on everything they’ve got to portray characters who are performers themselves—outsider artists who are less interested in developing the technique that would ground their passionate display than in climbing the highs of their ever-escalating fantasies and “inspirations.”
What holds Sally Bowles, Christopher Isherwood’s most famous creation, together? Her rouge pot, her ratty fur coat, and her hope in the face of unconquerable odds, which include her lack of singing and dancing talent…
Article by Hilton Als; photo by Brigitte Lacombe.
