Cabaret star Madeline Brewer: ‘I see Sally Bowles as a vulnerable punk’

msn.com:

Orange is the New Black. And she’s certainly blazing her way through this autumn. You will be able to see her soon on TV in her Emmy-nominated role as one-eyed sex slave Janine in the latest season of The Handmaid’s Tale, and on the London stage in Frecknall’s Olivier Award-winning production of Cabaret.

Brewer will take over the role of nightclub singer Sally Bowles from Amy Lennox in a show that transforms the Playhouse Theatre into a 1930s Berlin cabaret club, with stars slipping from the spotlight to perch on the knees of audience members. “After so much TV work, I must admit I was surprised by how nervous, how self-conscious I felt back in the theatre,” Brewer tells me on a video call between rehearsals. “I’m used to being in a room with 30 people.

But they’re behind cameras or whatever. So it took a week or so to remember that singing on a stage is home to me. This is what I trained to do!”Born in the Methodist town of Pitman, New Jersey, in 1992 – and crowned Miss Pitman at High School in 2010 – Brewer studied musical theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. “I was in musicals from the age of seven, eight.

I did community theatre. But I was a very self-conscious child. Not a natural child star at all. I loved the singing, but I found the acting harder.