Omari Douglas: ‘After It’s a Sin, I’ve realised that I was always supported for who I was’
Feature article for The Guardian Saturday Magazine
The Playhouse’s Cabaret is the latest in a long line: the 1966 musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb was inspired by John Van Druten’s classic 1951 play I Am a Camera, which was itself an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin. These facts are relayed to me by Douglas at breakneck speed; the actor has seen Cabaret three or four times. He is now stepping into the leading role of Clifford Bradshaw, a lost American novelist who arrives at Berlin’s seedy Kit Kat Club. “I’d never envisioned myself as a Cliff,” he says. “But we’re being given the space to find something new.”
Director Rebecca Frecknall has opted to portray Cliff, usually written as bisexual, as queer-identifying. As a Black actor taking on the role – also a rarity – Douglas is not nervous about such changes. “We’ve had those conversations about what nuances I as a Black actor will bring to the role, but it doesn’t feel like I’m having to work too hard to make it make sense,” he says. “Cliff is from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which was and still is a predominantly African American community; it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that there could have been a Black man who has come from America to Berlin to find himself and his identity”...
Online and in The Guardian Saturday Magazine now. Click here to read the full article.
Project Tags
Companies
The Guardian
- Publishing