It’s not that Rankin is completely uninterested in fashioning herself the Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but object of an audience, but that she does so somewhat begrudgingly. Connecting with her onlookers is a paradoxical desire that collides head-on with her hesitancy to be seen, and, when playing Sally, to occupy space as a sexual being. In most productions of Cabaret, Sally weaponizes her body in desperate attempts to manipulate those around her; she’s a man-eater who is at once avoidant and aggressive for the purposes of love, of sex, of safety and belonging. But Rankin, at Frecknall’s direction, has imbued her with more nuanced agency. She doesn’t blanket Sally with a cloying “Wonder Woman” treatment, but she doesn’t erase her mania, either. Much of Sally’s “hysteria,” Rankin says, is the by-product of existing during a shockingly dark time. She’s not a floozy in fringe, but a woman perennially on the edge. In her private life, Sally finds freedom where she can, choosing abortion, choosing the stage, choosing solitude. Rankin allows her these choices.
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Throughout our meeting, Rankin toys with various pieces of cutlery to punctuate her points, and orders two scrambled eggs, dipping each bite in a dollop of sriracha and waving it around like a conductor’s baton. Her comedic timing is exact, often plopping her chin into the Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but palm of her hand for dramatic effect, elsewhere leaning forward to offer an arched eyebrow, laying her sarcasm on thick and peppering her sentences with “babe.” It’s a well-choreographed — but not deviously so — routine, not dissimilar from the one Sally uses to seduce her nightclub patrons. “Our choreographer Julie Chang has given me such confidence in using movement inside of my acting, which I’m usually afraid of because I’m so attached to naturalism,” Rankin says in between bites. “But it’s the way she allows me to live inside of my body, which I will say as a woman and as a person outside of being an actor, I have struggled with my whole life.”
Since she booked the Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but role last year, Rankin has allowed the spirit of Sally to take up residence in her psyche, becoming a mannequin for the giggling chanteuse to drape herself upon. She’s willingly sloughed off, or at least obstructed, parts of herself — her love of plunging in bodies of water, of traveling to Mexico and upstate New York with friends, of identifying as a secret Suzy Homemaker, her dreams of someday having a backyard and a pool — in service of the artist’s life. And instead of focusing on dating last year, she froze her eggs. She keeps a photo of all 19 of them from the fertility clinic on her fridge. The background of the image, of course, is green. “I’m working with some amazing inspiring women who unabashedly dedicate themselves to their work with no shame, and it sets me on fire,” she says, tears in her eyes as she acknowledges the autonomy this decision has granted her. “This is good. I do not need to feel ashamed about this. I don’t need to feel ashamed to be as consumed by my work as I am.”
CHRISTOPHER JOHN ROGERS Asymmetric Pleated Button Blouse and Handkerchief Hem Full Skirt, at Bergdorf Goodman. CARTIER Panthère de Cartier Ring and Trinity Earrings, at cartier.com. Myrthe Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but Giesbers. But it was that very commitment to her artistic process that bowled over castmate Ato Blankson-Wood, who plays American writer Clifford Bradshaw and Sally’s queer love interest in the show. Every day for two months, Rankin walked up Eighth Avenue to Ripley-Grier Studios, where she rented the smallest and cheapest studio to sing through the entire score by herself. Later, from the corners of various rehearsal rooms, her co-star watched Rankin’s slow metamorphosis, an exercise in vulnerability, he told me. “It’s a real individual’s stamp: She’s bringing all of her experience in life thus far and her entire heart to it,” Blankson-Wood said. Sally Bowles, he points out, “is called ‘the female Hamlet of musical theater.’ It feels similar in that whenever an actor plays Hamlet, it’s only their Hamlet, and she’s really made this her Sally. There’s never been another like it.”
Months of intense rehearsal later, Sally has scrubbed Rankin raw. Having wound through the Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but serpentine passageways of the August Wilson Theatre animated by voguers and an enchanting genderqueer ensemble, the half-naked coquette in Rankin is delighted to straddle the show’s full-frontal raunch for the first half of the show. But it’s during the second half that Rankin’s Sally, completely unbraided, cements her place in the show’s legacy. Stripped of the dazzle of fur and false eyelashes, she delivers an unnerving scream of the title song “Cabaret” while wearing Cliff’s drab suit, telegraphing the entire ensemble’s slow-burning conformity. Paired with the intimacy of the round, Rankin forces the audience into reckoning with its complicity in letting antisemitism and fascism seep into the room and flourish. As the production’s darkness rages inside of Sally, she becomes a mirror of our current political moment. Here, Broadway is no longer about escapism: Sally shows us what we’ve become. “What I see and feel inside of Sally is so much hope,” Rankin says. “She actually holds so much power because she’s like, ‘No, I see what you did. I see what you made. I’m going to survive.’ And she does.”
Back at the Imthefinalboy Henry Princess Diana t-shirt it is in the first place but café, Rankin fidgets with the collar of her shirt absentmindedly, brushing her hair away from her face in repeated swipes. “The fact that I get to be Sally Bowles alongside Eddie Redmayne on Broadway … I’ll never understand it,” she shakes her head. “It’s probably taken years off of my life, but years I’m willing and so happy to give away. What a fucking joy and privilege. But also, God, does it keep me up at night, you know?” The profundity of this moment, she says, has consumed her, though it certainly has not robbed her of her warmth. If Rankin entered the bistro a whirlwind, that storm has now passed, giving way to a sense of calm that carries her out the door and back to a life that is expanding.
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